Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) leader Elon Musk recently shed light on “massive fraud” that is reportedly occurring within the Social Security Administration, allegedly leading to tax dollars being “stolen.” According to Musk, the Social Security database is not “de-duplicated,” supposedly entailing that the same Social Security Number can be used multiple times to commit fraud.
Sharing the findings on X, Musk wrote ,”Just learned that the social security database is not de-duplicated, meaning you can have the same SSN many times over, which further enables MASSIVE FRAUD!! Your tax dollars are being stolen.” The multi-billionaire had responded to a prior post of his outlining efforts in concert with the Treasury Department to audit the federal government.
The DOGE leader said in another post, “To be clear, what the @DOGE team and @USTreasury have jointly agreed makes sense is the following: – Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible.”
He continued, “- All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING! – The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored. Also, it can currently take up to a year to get on this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily.”
Speaking about the Social Security Administration, he added, “The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees, not anyone from @DOGE. It is ridiculous that these changes didn’t exist already! Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.”
Musk concluded, that these issues must be quickly mitigated. “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,” he said.
One comment read, “So they designed treasury payments the same way they designed the voting system. Impossible to audit.” Musk replied, “The best way to understand the system is that it is designed for complaint minimization: people don’t complain if they receive money, but do complain loudly (especially fraudsters!) if they don’t receive money. Therefore, everything is geared towards sending out the money, even if wasteful or fraudulent.”
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Responding to another user, Musk said nobody in the Treasury previously “cared enough” to investigate fraud. “Nobody in Treasury management cared enough before. I do want to credit the working level people in Treasury who have wanted to do this for many years, but have been stopped by prior management. Everything at Treasury was geared towards complain minimization. People we receive money don’t complain, but people who don’t receive money (especially fraudsters) complain very loudly, so the fraud was allowed to continue,” he wrote.
Watch Musk expose the media for receiving tax dollars here: