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About Those $4.7T in "Untraceable" Payments DOGE Allegedly Found [1]

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Date: 2025-02-18

When I saw the screaming headlines about $4.7T in “untraceable” treasury payments “uncovered” by the DOGE team, my BS detector began flashing red. The first problem with this assertion is that it defies basic logic: if the transactions were discoverable, they are also traceable. This is because, in order to pay someone, one needs a payee name, address or banking information, and the amount of the transaction. Using this information, one can research contracts held by the payee and work through the list to see which contract the payment pertains to. This is work that real auditors do.

I have spent my career in B2G marketing. As part of my professional development, I have taken certificate courses on federal contracts management, including financial management. I am also familiar with ERP and accounting sytems and how they are set up. There is no system in use today that does not include both approval workflows and audit trails. Both of these features make it impossible for payments to be “untraceable.”

So, what evidence does DOGE present to support their untraceability claims? They allege that the $4.7T in “untraceable” payments are missing a Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) code, which is analogous to a general ledger code. These codes tie the transaction to larger government accounts for the purpose of categorizing and analyzing them. Because the codes are comprised of multiple subcodes, the missing data could be a single subcode, multiple subcodes, or the entire string. DOGE alleges that this code was not a mandatory field. It seems highly unlikely that the entire string is an optional field because that would create an accounting mess. However, the TAS information page on the Treasury web site indicates that a TAS format change is on the horizon. When format changes occur in automated systems, there are often fields that stop being used or are added and would appear blank for transactions made before the field was added or blank in transactions that ocurred after a specific field stops being used.

Information about changes to CAS screens, mentioning new TAS format being rolled out.

Even if the entire TAS code was missing, the transactions would still not be untraceable. In order to access federal payment systems to request or review payments, a user must complete multiple screens of identifying data, be approved, log in securely, etc. An example of this can be found in the user guide the FCC produced for its grantees. This document includes actual payment request screens that show the level of detail required to create an account and to generate and submit a payment request. Even if the TAS code was missing from the payment request, there is enough data captured in the screens to trace a payment and tie it to an approved expenditure. If nothing else, it tells the auditor who to ask about the purpose of the payment. Asking these sorts of questions is what real auditors do.

There are no “untraceable” payments. What we do have is the DOGE team going out and making claims that are either the result of jumping to a conclusion (see: 150 year olds getting Social Security) or looking for evidence that can support their claims of fraud.

What frustrates me almost as much as the lies and half-truths from the DOGE team and the IQ47 administration is that no reporter is performing this sort of analysis. All of the information I used is available right on the Internet. This should be low-hanging fruit for a financial reporter, but I have yet to see any pushback on the “untraceable” payments claims, nor the overall claims that no one knows where the money is going.

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[1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/18/2304520/-About-Those-4-7M-in-Untraceable-Payments-DOGE-Allegedly-Found?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

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