It’s darkly amusing (sort of) that the highest-profile recent example of deficient accounting-related record-keeping comes from the ever-wondrous heart of American democracy, as summarized here by the New York Times:

• Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has deleted hundreds more claims from its mistake-plagued “wall of receipts,” erasing $4 billion in additional savings that the group said it had made for U.S. taxpayers.
• Late Sunday night, the group erased or altered more than 1,000 contracts it had claimed to cancel, representing more than 40 percent of all the contracts listed on its site last week. The deleted items included five of the seven largest savings that it had claimed credit for just last week. At the same time, the group added about 1,000 additional canceled contracts, worth smaller total savings.
• It was the second time in a week that DOGE had deleted some of its greatest claims of success. Early last week, it erased all five of the largest savings it had claimed when the wall of receipts, which is what the group is calling its list of canceled contracts, was originally posted on Feb. 19.
• Since that first posting, the total amount of savings that the initiative has claimed from cutting contracts has steadily declined, from $16 billion at first to less than $9 billion now.
• The “wall” shows only some of the cuts Mr. Musk has imposed on government, making it difficult to assess the claim that his initiative has saved taxpayers more than $100 billion. But the site is the only place where the group has given a detailed public accounting of its work, providing a rare look at its basic competence and familiarity with government data.
• Contracting and budget experts say that look has been worrisome.
• From its start, the list has been full of errors: claims that confused billions with millions, triple-counted the same cancellation, or claimed credit for contracts that had ended years or even decades before. Contracting experts said these mistakes raised questions about DOGE’s basic understanding of the federal government, at a time when Mr. Musk’s group is attempting to rapidly overhaul it.
• “Overall, there’s a certain randomness to it,” said Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “It seems like DOGE had certain agencies pull together some random lists of contracts that may or may not currently exist anyway, and then, without checking the data very well, uploaded it onto a website and summed up the amounts. It doesn’t seem to be centrally coordinated.”

The sloppiness is so pervasive and reckless that it’s plain no serious effort was made to verify the numbers before posting them, that the DOGE workers implicitly or explicitly assumed either that no one would engage very closely with their claims, or that they’d be able to shrug it off if they did. Based on all reporting, we can safely assume that the approach taken by DOGE in this respect also reflects the care and consideration exercised in the underlying work, given the regular reports of chaos, for example of firing people who were rapidly identified as being necessary after all, of disregard for contractual and ethical obligations, for any awareness of how one might be “penny-wise and pound-foolish”, for example in the area of tax compliance and collection:

• More than 7,000 IRS staffers, most of whom were probationary employees, were dismissed last month as part of government-wide cuts. With the enforcement and collection areas sustaining the largest downsizes, past IRS commissioners said the decisions seemingly go against the mission to increase cost savings.
• “The irony is this is an administration that claims to be worried about the deficit and claims to be looking for $2 trillion in savings. … And it seems to be nonsensical to think that one good way to do that is to hamstring your revenue arm, your accounts receivable division,” John Koskinen, who was IRS commissioner from 2013-2017, told Accounting Today.

It seems obvious that the DOGE effort could use the participation of accounting professionals on a number of levels, even if one would only pity the poor CPA who had to immerse him- or herself in such moral and intellectual wretchedness. In the absence of that, a different “fix” was applied:

• Mr. Musk’s group posted a new set of claims to its website on March 2, saying it had saved taxpayers $10 billion by terminating 3,489 federal grants.
• Previously when it posted new claims, DOGE, Mr. Musk’s government-restructuring effort, had included identifying details about the cuts it took credit for. That allowed the public to fact-check its work by comparing its figures with federal spending databases and talking to the groups whose funding had been cut.
• This time, it did not include those details. A White House official said that was done for security purposes.
• The result was that the group’s new claims appeared impossible to check.
• Noah Bookbinder, president of the left-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the removed information appeared to be a reaction to reports about DOGE’s errors.
• “They responded by giving less information publicly, so that it’s harder to question them,” Mr. Bookbinder said, “without doing anything to suggest that they’re actually correcting the mistakes, or learning from them.”

Truly, you almost have to bow your head in admiration…

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.