Summary
The Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General is launching an audit of the federal government’s payment system due to concerns about access granted to Elon Musk’s DOGE team.
Treasury officials gave conflicting accounts of DOGE’s access, raising fears of improper data use.
The audit will also review security controls and transactions related to Musk’s claims of fraudulent payments.
The audit, expected to conclude in August, may issue interim reports if critical issues emerge.
“Expected to conclude in August”
Government needs to be MUCH faster if they have any hope of prevailing here. Slow rolling ain’t gonna do shit.
This is the problem. It is much faster and easier to destroy than it is to create (or preserve).
It’s apparent you all haven’t been auditors. These systems are massive, and a real audit (not the bullshit faux-audits that DOGE is supposedly doing) takes thousands and thousands of man-hours on massive systems. Yes, DOGE has only been around for less than a month, but they’ve setup unauthorized systems and servers all over the fucking government. I can imagine what they’ve done at the Treasury Dept is going to take a lot of careful work and study to trace everything and generate a full report with actual artifacts.
That being said, at my job, we’ve had to comply with spontaneous audits on our network of over 100,000 devices (servers, workstations, appliances, etc) and have had it all completed within 2 months with around ~50 people working full-time. August is a tad extreme, but I’m guessing with such a sensitive system, they’re going to want it to be extremely thorough.
I don’t care. Six months is an insane time frame relative to the impacts and is honestly feeding into Musk et al’s narrative about government inefficiency. I understand a thorough audit takes time, but set a goal to release a preliminary report by end of March with an overview of major findings and then release the full report by June. But then they might have to work overtime…
Otherwise they might as well throw their report directly in the trash because it’ll end up being the Mueller and Smith investigations all over again: too late to matter.
Yeah, rush audits… What could go wrong?
I can articulate exactly what will go wrong with a slow audit: absolute irrelevance. High likelihood, high severity.
Can you articulate as clearly what will go wrong with moving with urgency?
You can’t be nearly as thorough as needed if you rush, and this is probably something we’ll only get one chance to do.
You also have to consider they have to get a contract and/or government employee team together to do the audit. If they go the contract route, that entails doing a Request For Proposal and the proper bidding process.
Government is slow because it’s supposed to be transparent with proper accountability along every step. DOGE/Trump/etc all comparing government to private business is extremely stupid for numerous reasons, because they both serve wildly different purposes and have vastly different objectives. Anyone that wants the government to be more like how a private business operates is a fucking idiot.
it is a joke that they require six months to audit an organization which has been around for a month and mainly ran by a bunch of kids
They are auditing the security of the payment system, not DOGE directly.