‘Relative to operations, there’s $500 billion of fraud every year, there’s hundreds of billions of dollars of improper payments and we can’t pass an audit. The consolidated financial report is produced by the Treasury, and we cannot pass an audit’, said Tom Krause in a Fox News interview.
Tom Krause, the CEO of Citrix parent Cloud Software Group who’s working with the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, said that his job as fiscal assistant secretary of the Treasury Department is to apply “public company standards to the federal government.”
In an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier Thursday, the former CFO and president at publicly traded tech giant Broadcom who hasn’t given an interview since joining the federal government as a special government employee after President Trump’s inauguration in January, said that it is “alarming” how the Treasury Department’s financial operations and financial management is set up today.
“There is actually really only one bank account that’s used to disburse all monies that go out of the federal government,” he continued. “A couple weeks ago, it had $800 billion in it but it’s the Treasury general account. So when you hear some of my colleagues here, what they’re talking about in terms of the fraud, you have to ask, ‘Well, why is this allowed to happen at a financial level?’ Well, it’s actually quite simple but alarming [what has happened at] the Treasury up until now, and thanks to President Trump we’re fixing this.”
Krause pointed to an executive order that Trump signed this week aimed at conducting “improper payment and fraud prevention screening prior to disbursing funds on behalf of agencies.”
“You know, No. 1, we’re changing the culture,” he said. “The culture has been not a lot of caring and not a lot of commitment to doing what’s right. Relative to operations, there’s $500 billion of fraud every year, there’s hundreds of billions of dollars of improper payments and we can’t pass an audit. The consolidated financial report is produced by the Treasury and we cannot pass an audit. We have material weaknesses. What that means is that if I was a public company CFO, I would effectively be removed. I couldn’t file financial statements; I couldn’t issue securities.
“We’re serving 580-plus agencies and up until very recently, effectively they could say make the payment and Treasury just sent it out as fast as possible, no verification,” he continued. “And so what we’re doing is what any household would do.”
Questions and concerns emerged earlier this year over the level of data access in various government agencies by the DOGE group formed by Trump and led by billionaire Musk, who is the founder of xAI, owner of X, and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. Krause’s name emerged in earlier news reports as someone affiliated with Musk’s DOGE work within the Treasury.
In early February, a letter from the Treasury to members of Congress called Krause “an expert/consultant” working with Treasury staff members with “read-only access to the coded data of the Fiscal Service’s payment systems” for an “operational efficiency assessment.”
Krause is still the CEO of Cloud Software Group as he works alongside Musk at DOGE. He has been the CEO of CSG since 2022 when Citrix was acquired by private equity firms Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital in a $16.5 billion deal that combined it with Tibco Software. He had been president of Broadcom Software Group, where he played a key role ushering in Broadcom’s blockbuster $61 billion VMware acquisition. After Krause left, his position within Broadcom was eliminated.
Krause was interviewed on Fox News along with Musk and six other members of the DOGE team, including Steve Davis, who has worked for Musk’s other companies including SpaceX, Boring Co. and X.
DOGE said that it has already saved taxpayers $130 billion with many programs cut and thousands of federal workers laid off in the process. CNN reported that more than 113,000 workers have been fired from federal agencies so far.
“Unless this exercise is successful, the ship of America will sink,” Musk said later in the interview.
Wade Millward contributed to this report.
