The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced Sunday that it had discovered approximately $4.7 trillion in government expenditures that are essentially untraceable due to missing account identification codes.

In a post on X, DOGE announced that it had identified nearly $4.7 trillion in Department of the Treasury payments that did not have a Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) code associated with them, which are used to link payments to a budget line item. “In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” DOGE posted. “As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going.”

During a joint press conference with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office last week, DOGE head Elon Musk referred to the missing ID codes as a primary reason why “departments can’t pass audits.” “[Y]ou can’t reconcile blank checks,” he observed. “You’ve got comment fields that are also blanks. You don’t know why the payment was made.”

Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur who was tapped by Trump to lead DOGE, went on to discuss other problematic aspects of the Treasury Department’s payment system.

“Then we’ve got this truly absurd … ‘do not pay’ list, which can take up to a year for an organization to get on the [list],” he explained. “We’re talking about terrorist organizations. We’re talking about known fraudsters, known aspects of waste, known things that do not match any congressional appropriation, [and it] can take up to a year to get on the list. And even what’s on the list, the list is not used. It’s mind-blowing. … [W]e’re really just talking about adding common-sense controls that should be present, that haven’t been present.”

In another X post published on Sunday, Musk highlighted an oddity present in the Social Security database that lists millions of individuals who have almost certainly passed away, including “more than 3.9 million in the 130-139 age range, more than 3.5 million in the 140-149 range and more than 1.3 million in the 150-159 range.” “Having tens of millions of people marked in Social Security as ‘ALIVE’ when they are definitely dead is a HUGE problem,” Musk noted.

As reported by the New York Post on Sunday, the issue has been known to the Social Security Administration (SSA) for some time. In two separate audits in 2023 and 2015, an SSA watchdog also found millions of individuals over 100 years of age in the system, but “[i]n both audits, the inspectors general concluded that ‘almost none’ were actually cashing Social Security checks — despite the glaring accounting errors identifying people born in 1886 and 1893 as still living, in two extreme cases.”

However, the audits “did reveal that around 531 million unique Social Security numbers are in circulation — and that ‘thousands’ may be in use to commit identity fraud.” For example, the 2015 audit “showed about $3.1 billion in earnings reported by employers or self-employed individuals who were not the actual Social Security number holder.”

Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for Economic and Social Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, told the New York Post that a vast black market of Social Security numbers of deceased individuals exists, in which illegal immigrants are “stealing identities of people who are deceased but not marked in the Social Security system.”

In all, DOGE has so far identified $55 billion in federal expenditures that have been targeted for elimination, according to an unofficial tally, with the goal of finding $2 trillion in government waste by July of next year.