How are Banks Spending Bailout $? Treasury Doesn't Care

clipped from www.propublica.org The Treasury Department has invested about $197 billion of the bailout money. About $49 billion more should soon be out the door (see our running tally here). Are banks boosting lending? Are they hording it? Are they using it to gobble up smaller banks? Treasury official Neel Kashkari testifies on the department's oversight of TARP on Capitol Hill. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images) Who knows. The Treasury Department certainly doesn’t have much of an idea about how that money’s being spent. The reason, as both the Government Accountability Office and a new report (PDF) today from the congressional oversight panel point out, is because Treasury isn’t tracking it. And it remains unclear whether Treasury thinks it ought to. “It’s not micromanaging to ask people what they did with what you gave them to the extent that it’s possible,“ GAO chief Gene Dodaro said at the hearing.

The piece tells us:

Today, Neel Kashkari, the Treasury official supervising the TARP, testified before Congress. And as before, he rejected the idea of tracking the money. “Each financial institution’s circumstances are different, making comparisons challenging at best, and it is difficult to track where individual dollars flow through an organization,“ he explained in his opening statement.

Let me go ahead and translate that from bullshit to English; "Keeping track of money's a lot of work. We can't expect banks -- whose business is dealing with money -- to do that."

It begs the question; what does anyone actually do at the Treasury Dept.? Is it anything like work?