Nine months in, the Treasury account holding Venezuela’s oil money has no public accounting

By Staff Reporter

WASHINGTON — Nine months after President Trump ordered Venezuela’s oil revenue held in a U.S. Treasury account, the administration has not publicly disclosed how much money is in it, how much has gone out or who received it. Democrats on several congressional committees have spent the fall asking for those numbers. The independent audits the State Department promised in April have not been released.

The account exists because of Executive Order 14373, signed Jan. 9 under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. It created what the order calls “Foreign Government Deposit Funds”: money from the sale of Venezuelan natural resources, held in designated Treasury accounts on behalf of Venezuela’s government. Treasury’s sanctions office now requires it. General License 50C, issued Aug. 27, lets six companies (BP, Chevron, Eni, Maurel & Prom, Repsol and Shell) operate in Venezuela’s oil sector, on the condition that “any payments of oil or gas taxes or royalties” to the Venezuelan government or its state oil company go into those funds.

Why it matters

The order gives the executive branch broad discretion over a foreign country’s main source of revenue, outside the normal appropriations process. The money is not U.S. property. The order says it belongs to Venezuela and is held “solely in a custodial and governmental capacity.” But the order also says the funds will be held “pending sovereign disposition for public, governmental, or diplomatic purposes determined by the Secretary of State,” and it directs the Treasury secretary to follow the secretary of state’s instructions on disbursements. Venezuela owns the money, and Washington decides when it moves.

What the administration has said

Most of what is public about how the fund works comes from the administration’s answers to Congress, as quoted in lawmakers’ letters. In an April 27 reply to Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Treasury said funds are disbursed “only if the Government of Venezuela provides State with appropriate commitments that funds will be used for approved purposes, such as supporting public-sector employee salaries and official expenses of the Government of Venezuela, including medical supplies and energy infrastructure.” Garcia quoted that letter in an Aug. 4 follow-up and wrote that it “did not provide an accounting of the amount spent for any given purpose.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has testified that Venezuelan authorities make spending requests and the U.S. government decides whether to approve them, according to a Sept. 16 letter from Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the top Democrats on the Finance, Banking and Environment and Public Works committees. Treasury’s own guidance sends companies that want to pay into the account to a State Department email inbox to get the account details.

How much money?

Nobody outside the government has published a ledger. At an April House Foreign Affairs hearing, a State Department official said about $3 billion had passed through the fund as of April 16, and that its balance swung from near zero to more than $1 billion that month, according to a Sept. 21 letter from Reps. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Ami Bera (D-Calif.). The lawmakers wrote that disbursements had included payroll for Venezuelan government employees and “liquidity injections into Venezuela’s financial system.”

By July the figure had grown. Garcia’s letter cites a Financial Times calculation that the United States had collected at least $13 billion, and it quotes the president telling reporters on July 27 that the money had paid for the U.S. intervention in Venezuela “many times over.” Garcia also noted that a Venezuelan government website set up to track the oil sales showed a single $300 million expense, in March.

The senators’ letter adds two details. It says the funds were first held in a bank account in Qatar before moving to Treasury, and it asks whether any money remains at Qatar National Bank. It also notes that Treasury said on July 27 it would not enforce U.S. anti-money-laundering law for transactions involving Venezuela for six months, which the department framed as a disaster-relief measure.

The missing audit

The State Department’s answer to oversight questions has been an outside auditor. Castro’s letter quotes Michael Kozak, a senior State Department official, telling the committee that KPMG had been hired to review transactions “on at least a quarterly basis,” going back to the fund’s creation.

Federal contracting records show the State Department’s acquisitions office awarded KPMG a delivery order in April for a “Venezuela Natural Resources Revenue Transparency Mechanism.” It is worth up to $84.4 million over five and a half years, and about $14.9 million had been obligated as of the last modification, according to a contract summary compiled by HigherGov from federal procurement data. The order drew a single bid.

No audit has been made public. The House Democrats asked Rubio for every KPMG report and a full accounting of disbursements by Oct. 8. The senators asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Rubio for monthly account statements and a transaction-by-transaction record by Oct. 5. The Washington Inquisitor could find no public response to either letter.

The oversight gap

Every demand for records so far has come from Democrats, who are in the minority in both chambers and cannot issue subpoenas on their own. In September, Castro offered a motion in the Foreign Affairs Western Hemisphere subcommittee to subpoena records on a separate administration deal over Venezuelan oil fields, his office said.

The executive order offers one formal channel. It authorizes the Treasury secretary, in consultation with the secretary of state, to submit the recurring reports on national emergencies that the emergency powers law requires at least every six months. Whether any report to date has included the fund’s balance is not public.

Policy keeps moving in the meantime. On Friday, Treasury issued an amended Venezuela license for earthquake relief. If Democrats win a chamber on Nov. 3, they will gain subpoena power in January, and the KPMG audits would be among the first documents they could demand.

Image: The U.S. Treasury Building in Washington. Photo by MeanieHyaena via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.