TreasuryDirect is a website run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service under the

United States Department of the Treasury The Department of the Treasury (USDT) is the national treasury and finance department of the federal government of the United States, where it serves as an executive department. The department oversees the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and t ...

that allows US individual investors to purchase

treasury securities United States Treasury securities, also called Treasuries or Treasurys, are government debt instruments issued by the United States Department of the Treasury to finance government spending as an alternative to taxation. Since 2012, U.S. gov ...

, such as

savings bond A savings bond is a government bond designed to provide funds for the issuer while also providing a relatively safe investment for the purchaser to save money, typically a retail investor. The earliest savings bonds were the war bond programs of Wor ...

s, directly from the US government. It enables people to manage their investments online, including connecting their TreasuryDirect account to a bank account for deposits and withdrawals. TreasuryDirect started in 1986 as a

book entry Book entry is a system of tracking ownership of securities where no certificate is given to investors. Several terms are often used interchangeably with "book entry" shares including "paperless shares", "electronic shares", "digital shares", "digi ...

system with business conducted over

postal mail The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letters, and parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid-19th century, national postal syst ...

, as an alternative to purchasing securities as

engraved Engraving is the practice of incising a design onto a hard, usually flat surface by cutting grooves into it with a burin. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an in ...

paper certificates. The current online system launched in 2002. Treasury has been working on a new version since 2014, but it has not launched yet.

Products and services

A TreasuryDirect account enables purchasing treasury securities: Treasury bills, Treasury notes, Treasury bonds, Inflation-Protected Securities ( TIPS),

floating rate note Floating rate notes (FRNs) are bonds that have a variable coupon, equal to a money market reference rate, like LIBOR or federal funds rate, plus a quoted spread (also known as quoted margin). The spread is a rate that remains constant. Almost all ...

s (FRNs), and Series I and EE Savings Bonds in electronic form. TreasuryDirect charges no fees for opening an account, purchasing bonds, redeeming bonds, or maintaining an account. It allows rolling repurchase of securities as the currently-held items mature. The website allows money to be deposited from and withdrawn to personal bank accounts. A TreasuryDirect account holder can direct the Treasury to deposit all of part of their income

tax refund A tax refund or tax rebate is a payment to the taxpayer due to the taxpayer having paid more tax than they owed. By country United States According to the Internal Revenue Service, 77% of tax returns filed in 2004 resulted in a refund check, ...

into their account using IRS Form 8888. A person can also instruct their employer to

direct deposit A direct deposit (or direct credit), in banking, is a deposit of money by a payer directly into a payee's bank account. Direct deposits are most commonly made by businesses in the payment of salaries and wages and for the payment of suppliers' acco ...

an amount from each paycheck into their TreasuryDirect account, which replaced an earlier system where an employee could instruct their company to purchase paper bonds with a portion of their paycheck. TreasuryDirect offers a way for people to convert their paper savings bonds into

form (managed within the electronic system), which reduces the risk of losing paper bonds and allows redeeming bonds online. Another component is "Treasury Hunt", a tool to help the public find and cash in their mature savings bonds and other security interest payments owed to them. As of 2019, the public held $26 billion of savings bonds that are no longer earning interest. TreasuryDirect includes information and research tools to help individual investors purchase and manage Treasury securities. The TreasuryDirect system can be accessed via the URL
wizard.gov
', which formerly led to its Savings Bond Wizard tool (replaced by a Savings Bond Calculator).

Account management

Account registration with TreasuryDirect includes an identity verification step, and the system requires some people to complete additional identity verification by bringing a paper form to a bank or

credit union A credit union, a type of financial institution similar to a commercial bank, is a member-owned nonprofit organization, nonprofit financial cooperative. Credit unions generally provide services to members similar to retail banks, including depo ...

for a

medallion signature guarantee In the United States, a medallion signature guarantee is a special signature guarantee used primarily when a client transfers or sells US securities. It is an assurance by the financial institution granting the guarantee that the signature on the ...

, then mailing it. That process can be complicated and take weeks, and US Representative

Abigail Spanberger Abigail Anne Spanberger (née Davis, August 7, 1979) is an American politician serving as the U.S. representative from since 2019. She is a member of the Democratic Party. Her district includes most of the northern suburbs of Richmond, as well a ...

wrote a letter of concern about this to the Department of the Treasury. The online account process can be especially difficult for people less familiar with electronic systems. If a person enters incorrect bank information into TreasuryDirect, they need to complete the paper signature guarantee process to get the account updated. This paper process is also necessary if a person needs to update their TreasuryDirect account to link it with a new bank account. In 2022, Treasury said they were working to add the option of getting these paper forms

notarized A notary is a person authorised to perform acts in legal affairs, in particular witnessing signatures on documents. The form that the notarial profession takes varies with local legal systems. A notary, while a legal professional, is disti ...

for identity verification. The TreasuryDirect login screen requires the user to enter their password using a virtual keyboard, which prevents copying-and-pasting a password or automatically entering a password using some

password manager A password manager is a computer program that allows users to store and manage their passwords for local applications and online services. In many cases software used to manage passwords allow also generate strong passwords and fill forms. Pas ...

s. This virtual keyboard makes using a

strong password Password strength is a measure of the effectiveness of a password against guessing or brute-force attacks. In its usual form, it estimates how many trials an attacker who does not have direct access to the password would need, on average, to gues ...

more difficult, and people have made unofficial bookmarklets and

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s to enable pasting a password. After logging in, a user cannot use their web browser "back" button during their session, since that can log them out. Personal finance columnists have described the website as frustrating, finicky, clunky, and outdated. Related to increased demand in 2022, the TreasuryDirect customer support phone number sometimes had wait times longer than two hours. TreasuryDirect says that customer requests sent by mail can take up to 13 weeks to process. This can cause issues for people who need assistance with selecting and filling out the correct forms to take actions on their investments. The

terms and conditions A contractual term is "any provision forming part of a contract". Each term gives rise to a contractual obligation, the breach of which may give rise to litigation. Not all terms are stated expressly and some terms carry less legal gravity as t ...

for securities purchased through TreasuryDirect are in the ''

Code of Federal Regulations In the law of the United States, the ''Code of Federal Regulations'' (''CFR'') is the codification of the general and permanent regulations promulgated by the executive departments and agencies of the federal government of the United States. ...

'' in the form of a FAQ, including details about account management.

System history

Before establishing TreasuryDirect, Treasury staff sold securities in paper certificate form to individual investors from windows in the lobbies of their office in

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and some

Federal Reserve Bank A Federal Reserve Bank is a regional bank of the Federal Reserve System, the central banking system of the United States. There are twelve in total, one for each of the twelve Federal Reserve Districts that were created by the Federal Reserve A ...

1980s: Postal mail

The TreasuryDirect service originated in 1986 as a computerized service conducted over postal mail. Instead of issuing traditional

certificates, it sold notes, bonds, and bills in a computerized book-entry system; Treasury estimated that this shift would save $46 million.

1990s: Telephone and website

TreasuryDirect had 900,000 participants in 1996, which dropped in 1997 to 825,000 participants. In 1997, the system, described as "suffering from pre-electronic age procedures", was updated to modernize it and encourage more people to participate. The changes included enabling debits from a bank account (instead of paying by check), ordering reinvestments over a

toll-free telephone number A toll-free telephone number or freephone number is a telephone number that is billed for all arriving calls. For the calling party, a call to a toll-free number from a landline is free of charge. A toll-free number is identified by a dialing prefi ...

, and selling securities by mail. By 1998, the Treasury website hosted forms that a person could print out and mail to establish a TreasuryDirect account. In 1999, Treasury started a separate service called Savings Bond Direct that allowed buying paper savings bonds online with a credit card and without establishing an account.

2000s: Online sales

The TreasuryDirect website started selling electronic Series I bonds online in October 2002, and it added Series EE bonds in May 2003. This system was designed to support up to 80 million user accounts; by March 2004, it had 168,000 accounts. The online TreasuryDirect service was part of Treasury's plan to stop selling paper savings bonds. At the time, a Treasury official said that the cost of running the paper savings bond program was relatively high, making it ''not an efficient means of financing for the federal government". Treasury continued to offer book-entry sales via postal mail and telephone orders, calling that system Legacy TreasuryDirect to distinguish it from online TreasuryDirect accounts.

2010s: Online-only services

Treasury stopped selling paper Series EE and I savings bonds on December 31, 2011, requiring people to use the TreasuryDirect website to purchase them, except for paper Series I bonds purchased using a tax return. Paper savings bonds were previously a common gift that family members bought for children from a local bank or credit union, but people found giving bonds in electronic form to be more complicated. However, the switch to electronic bonds did not significantly impact overall bond sales, as reported by the

Government Accountability Office The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is a legislative branch government agency that provides auditing, evaluative, and investigative services for the United States Congress. It is the supreme audit institution of the federal govern ...

in 2015: "the decline in savings bond purchases after Treasury discontinued the sale of paper savings bonds in January 2012 was consistent with the overall long-term decline in savings bond purchases". Savings bond purchasers tend to purchase fewer bonds when interest rates are lower, and interest rates had been declining over the past several years. For example, in May 2015, new Series EE bonds earned 0.3 percent interest, and new Series I bonds earned zero percent interest at that time. In 2011, Treasury began phasing out Legacy TreasuryDirect, encouraging account holders to transition to the online system. Treasury decommissioned the legacy service in 2014, but continues to allow remaining account holders to hold securities to maturity or transfer securities to another account.

Plans for replacement of TreasuryDirect

In 2014, Treasury published a request for comments to inform their work on Treasury Retail Investment Manager (TRIM), a future replacement for TreasuryDirect that would be "more flexible and responsive to changing business needs for delivering digital investing needs." Treasury published

sources sought A sources sought (often capitalized as Sources Sought) notice is used by agencies of the government of the United States to solicit interest in a project under consideration by that agency. They are not requests for proposals or invitations to bid ...

notices in 2015 for

architectural design Building design refers to the broadly based architectural, engineering and technical applications to the design of buildings. All building projects require the services of a building designer, typically a licensed architect. Smaller, less complic ...

and

fraud In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right. Fraud can violate civil law (e.g., a fraud victim may sue the fraud perpetrator to avoid the fraud or recover monetary compens ...

prevention for TRIM. As of May 2015, Treasury was working on defining technical requirements and intending to "develop an implementation plan for TRIM by April 2016", part of a four-phase development plan: initiation, planning, execution, and closing. In 2019, Treasury said that TRIM would support both laptops and mobile phones, and that it would "allow the unbanked and the under-banked to electronically purchase investments by providing alternative payment mechanisms, unlike TreasuryDirect which requires bank accounts."

2020s

During the

2021–2022 inflation surge The 2021–2022 inflation surge is the higher-than-average economic inflation throughout much of the world that began in early 2021. It has been attributed to the 2021 global supply chain crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and unexpected ...

, a number of financial planners pointed out the potential benefits of using TreasuryDirect to purchase Series I Bonds during periods of high inflation, because their return is adjusted to match inflation. The annual interest rate for I Bonds was 9.62% in April 2022, the highest inflation rate since this type of bond was introduced in 1998. People opened 1.85 million new savings bond accounts between November 2021 and the end of June 2022. In May 2022, the TreasuryDirect website crashed at least once related to increased demand. TreasuryDirect is part of the Treasury Retail Securities Services program, and a 2022 Treasury budget document said "In FY 2020, Retail began development work to replace its aging TreasuryDirect (TD) application...With the deployment of TRIM, Retail will also roll out a new type of savings security for the public." A Treasury spokesperson also said in March 2022 that they were working on a replacement system. In October 2022, TreasuryDirect updated its public informational website to make it easier to navigate and understand for investors looking for answers about bonds and other Treasury products. At that time, Treasury said they had sold $27 billion in I Bonds since increasing the interest rate in November 2021, compared to $364 million in 2020. Near the end of October 2022, in the last few days that TreasuryDirect offered the 9.62% rate, the website saw a surge of new customers and was slow or unavailable to access for some people who had wanted to buy I Bonds. Treasury said it couldn't guarantee that all orders would be completed in time to receive the 9.62% rate, and that the volume of purchases was causing "significant pressure and strain on the 20-year-old TreasuryDirect application".

Similar programs

The National Treasury of Brazil has an online service called ''Tesouro Direto'' (Treasury Direct) that sells public bonds to individuals in Brazil, established in 2002. The federal government of Mexico established ''

cetesdirecto Cetesdirecto is a Mexican government program established on November 26, 2010 after an effort to promote and extend savings and investment in the country. This program allows small and medium investors to have access to financial services and to ...

'' (Treasury Certificates Direct) in 2010 to enable small and medium investors to purchase government securities online, by phone, and at customer service windows. The

Bank of Spain The Bank of Spain ( es, link=no, Banco de España) is the central bank of Spain. Established in Madrid in 1782 by Charles III of Spain, Charles III, today the bank is a member of the European System of Central Banks and is also Spain's national ...

offers a ''Cuentas Directas'' (direct accounts) service to residents of Spain who want to purchase newly-issued Spanish Treasury securities.

References

External links

TreasuryDirect
** {{webarchive , url=https://web.archive.org/web/20000302220232/https://www.treasurydirect.gov/ , date=March 2, 2000 , title=Snapshot
ITDashboard.gov details about future replacement (TRIM)
United States Department of the Treasury Government services web portals in the United States Government bonds