Nearly one-third of Treasury payments a year lack proper identification codes, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent testified to Congress recently
Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered $4.7 trillion in untraceable Treasury Department payments.
Prior to the discovery, Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) identification codes were optional for $4.7 trillion in Treasury Department payments, so they were often left blank and were untraceable. The field is now required to increase “insight into where the money is actually going,” the Treasury Department and DOGE announced in February.
“Of the 1.5 billion payments that we send out every year, they are required to have a TAS, a Treasury Account Symbol. We discovered that more than one third of those payments did not have a TAS number,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government earlier this month.