The question to be asked here is whether this finding by DOGE on internal control failures at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service will be credibly reported or whether it will be propagandized and distorted in an effort to sweep it under the rug?
From Elon Musk’s tweet, this is what DOGE found at the US Treasury:
To be clear, what the @DOGE team and @USTreasury have jointly agreed makes sense is the following:
- Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible.
- All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!
- The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored. Also, it can currently take up to a year to get on this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily.
The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees, not anyone from @DOGE. It is ridiculous that these changes didn’t exist already!
Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.
When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!!
This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.
These were the systems that David Lebryk resigned from the Treasury rather than grant DOGE access.
This would appear to be a confirmation of an earlier tweet by Elon alleging dysfunctional internal controls at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service.
Remember, the General Accounting Office confirmed last fall, before DOGE even existed, that Trillions in improper payments have been made by the Treasury over the years.
The internal controls that federal regulations require of federal grant recipients are apparently being disregarded wholesale by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service.
That is what DOGE is reporting to the American people here.
Internal controls are foundational to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, and apply even in government accounting. So essential are they to sound accounting and sound money management that failure to implement or adhere to internal control mechanisms is a violation of any payment processor’s duty of care for the funds under its control.
The failure in a duty of care is, depending on the situation, either a civil tort or a crime for which actual intent does not need to be shown. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service had an affirmative duty to not disregard its own internal control systems, and we now being told that in fact it did disregard them.
Immediately after finding these things, a federal judge moved to suspend DOGE access to the US Treasury systems.
The preliminary injunction issued Saturday by U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer backed 19 Democratic state attorneys general who claimed that giving DOGE "full access" to the Treasury’s payment systems violates the law.
Democrats can howl all they want about how DOGE is proceeding with its audits and reviews of federal bureaucracies. As a taxpayer, I want an explanation of how literally billions of payments are being made by the Treasury with no oversight and no adherence even to the established internal control systems. I want an explanation of how the Treasury has been okay with having inadequate internal controls with inadequate enforcement provisions.
Explain that first. Then and only then will we talk about DOGE stepping on toes and ruffling feathers.
Really excellent,Peter! Expose this corruption in all of the FACTUAL details. You are the champ at analyzing data and getting to the heart of what it proves.
What we have as an ally now is that it is extremely easy for people to believe there’s corruption in government. AND a lot of the information that is being exposed is JUICY. If people hear that Chelsea Clinton took $3 million from her charity to pay for her own WEDDING, oh my, people will gossip about that!
The waking-up progression is like this:
1) My child got the Covid shot and keeled over dead! (You poor dear, but that’s delusional - you are mistaken.)
2) Fauci’s mandated hospital protocol of Remdesivir, intubation, and ventilators killed 600,000 people! (Right-wing conspiracy theory, too monstrous to believe!)
3) Hundreds of scientific studies show great harm was done, and government covered it up! (Hmm, could there be something to this?)
4) It’s all government corruption! Thousands of elites benefited at taxpayers’ expense! (NOW it’s all fitting together and making sense!)
5) “Expose all of the details, then prosecute and punish those responsible! We will never be victimized by these elites again!”
I am sure this is just a small percentage of the money laundering and fraud that went on during the Biden administration's term in office. When you throw out trillions of dollars that weren't previously necessary they have to be going somewhere.