Is there such a thing as a "Treasury Access Symbol" (TAS) as a post from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on X said? No, that's not true: The post contained a typo and the document it linked to refers to something called a "Treasury Account Symbol" (TAS). Google shows no use of the term "Treasury Access Symbol" before the X post was made but the term has now made its way into news reporting.
The term appeared in a post on X (archived here) published by @DOGE on February 17, 2025 which read:
The Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process).
In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible. As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going. Thanks to @USTreasury
for the great work.https://tfx.treasury.gov/taxonomy/term/10257
This is what the post looked like:
(Image source: screenshot from x.com taken on February 18, 2025 at 12:05:42 UTC)
However, the link in the post, https://tfx.treasury.gov/taxonomy/term/10257 (archived here) went to a webpage at the Treasury Department that defined the term "Treasury Account Symbol":
A Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) is an identification code assigned by the Department of the Treasury (Treasury), in collaboration with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the owner agency, to an individual appropriation, receipt, or other fund account. The term "Treasury Account Symbol" is a generic term used to describe any one of the account identification codes assigned by Treasury and is also referred to as the "account". All financial transactions of the federal government are classified by TAS for reporting to Treasury and OMB. For more information on account symbols and titles, Fiscal Service issues a Treasury Financial Manual supplement titled "Federal Account Symbols and Titles Book".
The page linked to another government resource (archived here) that listed all these account symbols.
Lead Stories performed a Google search for the phrase "Treasury Access Symbol" limited to pages found before February 1, 2025 and excluding results from X/Twitter and Facebook (archived here). Only a handful of results were returned and the references on those pages were all added very recently (for example in sidebar lists of recent or trending stories).
According to a Google News search (archived here), several major news websites are now using the term "Treasury Access Symbol" in reporting about the DOGE post.
