Elon Musk’s DOGE team to gain read-only access to U.S. central accounting system amid treasury dispute

DOGE’s lead, Elon Musk, plans to send officials to Parkersburg, West Virginia, next week to gain read-only access to the U.S. government’s Central Accounting Reporting System (CARS).

As part of DOGE’s role, Musk has actively requested access to multiple financial records; however, the billionaire is already being dragged to court over privacy violations.

Musk will have a team go through CARS data next week

So far, the Tesla CEO has faced resistance to accessing the federal data systems and has recently been restricted from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment system. 

A federal judge is still hearing arguments in a lawsuit filed by employee unions and retirees, who allege that the billionaire violated privacy laws.

Only two employees, Tom Krause and Marko Elez have been permitted to access payments, and only on a read-only basis.

Nevertheless, Musk will coordinate a visit to the Bureau of Fiscal Service building in Parkersburg, supposedly from Tuesday through Thursday next week, to get CARS data. 

The CARS data is slightly different from the other payment systems data Musk has asked to access, especially since it’s used to compile the country’s balance sheet and handle banking information from agencies and the Federal Reserve Bank.

The CARS database also keeps tabs on the transactions across federal agencies till the final destination of funds.

Moreover, the treasury offices in Parkersburg Musk plans to visit also house the Bureau of Public Debt, which is responsible for daily accounting for the $28.9 trillion national debt.

Musk says they agreed with the U.S. treasury to implement several changes

In an X post on February 8, Musk said that the DOGE team and the U.S. treasury agreed on certain conditions, moving forward, calling them “super obvious and necessary” changes that have to be implemented.

According to Musk, the U.S. Treasury will have a payment categorization code for all outgoing government payments to facilitate financial audits.

Furthermore, all future payments will require intent or rationale to be filled in the comment section. He argued that filling out the rationale is a simple attempt to explain the payment rather than giving nothing by leaving the field blank.

Additionally, the DO-NOT-PAY list of entities, usually fraudulent, dead, or fronts for terrorist groups, must be enforced, insisting that the list should even be updated weekly or daily, if possible.

However, the U.S. treasury has yet to confirm whether they agreed on any of these changes.

Musk had even asked for the treasury to address the entitlement payment fraud issue in his post. He said that he was informed that over $100 billion per year in entitlement payments are being made to individuals without an SSN or even a temporary ID number.

He added:

When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!! This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.

Elon Musk

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