Recently five former Dem Secretaries of the Treasury wrote a letter decrying the investigative work being done by Elon Trump’s (haha) Musk’s storm troopers — those fatally young, unpressed khaki-shorted, stained tee-shirted, loosely-groomed, jack-booted thugs from DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency).

Like the the pre-Presidential election 2020 letter from the 51 intel community pros, the 5 Secretaries of Treasury letter is mostly nonsense of a scatalogical type.

Here is a link to the letter:

Five Treasury Secretaries Walked Into A Bar, Had Some Drinks, and Here is What They Said

As you can read, they are all concerned about the “payment system” of the Department of the Treasury. The bloody payment system is a shambles and is wildly analog, inconsistent, and antiquated thereby giving rise to massive amounts of money being siphoned off due to fraud, waste, and poor record keeping.

How should a payment system work, Big Red Car?

Having been in business for four decades, I have personal experience with the payment cycle and how payments are made in accordance with just slightly tech automated systems. When I was first in business, this was all done manually as computers and accounting software hadn’t been invented yet. Boom!

 1. When a company buys something it is done subject to a “contract” or a “purchase order.” When a contract is executed, a purchase order is also simultaneously created. This purchase order has a unique number and identifies the who, what, when, where, why, and how much of the purchase.

It also contains the identification of the provider or seller (vendor) and its unique identification number (both for US taxes and within the accounting system).

This is all entered into the automated payment system — an accounting system such as QuikBooks. There would be a PO number, a vendor, and a committed amount.

With this information, a CFO could ask the accounting department to run a report showing the amount of commitments to pay the company has made. In this manner, you would have a complete handle on how much you have outstanding.

 2. When the service is provided or the product arrives several things happen.

In the event of a product, the vendor may have provided a shipping alert and shipping info — just like how Amazon notifies you your new cordless 4 1/2″ DeWalt angle grinder is on the way.

When the product arrives at a receiving dock, a “receiver” is created and whoever ordered the product is alerted to come get it. Sometimes, it will be directly shipped to the end user. This receiver has a unique number that marries with the purchase order.

Purchase order >>> shipping alert >>> receiver. An orderly, auditable process. Every document has the same PO # for reference.

The end user then inspects the product and “accepts” it.

[Note: this is all done on screens and by software even when docs have to be scanned. Automated AF.]

 3. Upon acceptance, the vendor sends an invoice to the company requesting payment in accordance with the original purchase order. This is often “approved” by the end user who then signs off on the invoice and sends it along to ACCOUNTS PAYABLE for payment.

In my world this would all involve a controller and accountants who  worked for my company and were supervised by the Chief Financial Officer. I would often have up to 10 – 25 such persons in the accounting shop.

 4. The payment persons would put together all the accounts payable and batch them up. They would inspect each one and check, doublecheck, and re-check the original purchase order, the receiver, and the approved invoice.

When everything was verified, they would prepare checks to be signed by the controller. Checks in excess of a certain amount — in my companies that was always $2,000 as I am a stickler for security — would require two signatures.

Checks were signed and sent out.

[Again, all of the above automated and digital.]

 5. Simultaneously with the above, the information would be entered into an accounting document called a General Ledger. The GL receives every income and expense transaction and they are coded. In this instance, the code would refer to the purchase order and there would be a textual annotation of the nature of the income or expense.

 6. From this general ledger, the accounting software would automatically configure:

a cash receipts journal,

a cash disbursements journal,

a job cost on each job showing the committed amount/current payments/remaining amount for every purchase order with multiple payments,

an income statement,

a balance sheet, and

a statement of cash flows.

There would also be a vendor journal that would show the payment history to that vendor.

Sounds like a lot of work, but it is all automated. Once the payment person makes all the proper notations, this is done automatically.

 7. At the end of the month, the CFO would publish the information and reconcile it with the checking accounts.

There is a system to do this correctly and it requires designing, implementing, operating, and monitoring the system at all times. It is hard work.

When someone says an entity did not pass an audit, it means that some of all of the above are missing. It is a failure of the accounting system.

So, Big Red Car, WTF is the problem with the US Treasury?

The bottom line is Treasury does not have a “system” and they pay off invoices that are not verified by the end user. No purchase order >>> receiver >>> acceptance >>> approved invoice >>> checks — just invoices.

Treasury has a list of persons who are known fraudsters or terrorists, but this list is only updated once a year. The US Treasury knows it has paid billions and billions of dollars to these people.

Treasury is hopelessly analog with virtually none of this being automated. Want an idea of what it looks like:

This picture is a contracted storage space located in a limestone cave under a mountain. It holds all the retirement records of the Federal work force. You will notice these records are paper files in racks. When a Federal employee files for retirement it takes months to do the paperwork because peopl e have to manually retrieve files. It is not automated or digital.

The US Treasury is literally cave men. Haha, you can’t make this shit up.

Bottom line it, Big Red Car, we’re getting our nails done and a facial

Fine, dear reader. Here’s the bottom line.

 1. You have Elon Musk — a guy who can literally operate a rocket science company and recover the rockets, something never done by any other human — who has inspected the US Treasury with his henchnerds and they are puking seeing the cave man reality of the government.

It is all  woefully antiquated and manual.

 2. You have these 5 former Dem Sec Treasury buffoons who are saying, “Ah, shucks, it isn’t so bad.”

 3. You have billions of dollars of waste and fraud and even Treasury admits it take a year to update the Shitheads List.

It is time to jerk the US government kicking and screaming into the digital age and to exert the kind of financial controls that every private company in American uses and the result will be less manpower and the elimination of waste and fraud. This is low hanging fruit. 

FFS, America, this is nuts.

But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car.