DOGE Reports $4.7 Trillion In ‘Untraceable’ Treasury Payments: Missing A Critical Tracking Code

OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
4:00 PM – Tuesday, February 18, 2025

On Monday, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) revealed that around $4.7 trillion in Treasury Department payments were “almost impossible” to trace because they lacked a crucial tracking code.

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According to DOGE, the transactions lacked the Treasury Account Symbol (TAS), an identification number that connects a Treasury payment to a line item in the budget. DOGE defined the use of the TAS as a “standard financial process.”

“In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” stated an X post from DOGE.

Due to the revelation, the TAS code is now mandatory.

“As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going,” DOGE stated, while thanking the Treasury Department for its “great work” implementing the change.

“This was a combined effort of [DOGE, Treasury and the Federal Reserve],” Musk posted on X, referencing the change. “Nice work by all.” 

So far, DOGE has successfully saved the federal government $55 billion after finding waste, fraud, and government overspending—and this is just the start.

“The savings comes from a combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings,” DOGE stated on its website.

One of the first departments DOGE integrated itself into following President Donald Trump’s inauguration was the Treasury Department, which handles trillions of dollars’ worth of federal payments annually.

To combat waste, fraud, and abuse, DOGE employees have been given access to the Treasury department’s sensitive payment systems.

“This is not some roving band … This is methodical and it is going to yield big savings,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said regarding DOGE during a Bloomberg TV interview.

At the Treasury, DOGE also recently suggested “deleting paper checks,” arguing that taxpayers would save “at least $750 million per year.”

In order to collect the more than 100 million checks that the Treasury Department handles annually, it must maintain “a physical lockbox,” which costs roughly $2.40 per check, according to the effort.

Additionally, DOGE noted that around $25 billion in tax refunds were lost or delayed in fiscal year 2023 as a result of rejected or expired checks.