A few months ago, before its more worrying activities came to light, the IRS apologized for spending $60,000 to produce a pair of training videos parodying Gilligan’s Island and Star Trek for use at its 2010 training and leadership conference during what an agency spokesman described as “a difficult period for the IRS.” Now it will have more to apologize for.
An audit set to be released tomorrow by the Treasury inspector general finds that the IRS spent nearly $50 million over the past three years on more than 200 employee conferences, including the one at which the Star Trek parody was shown, the Washington Post reported over the weekend.
The report focuses especially on an August 2010 conference in Anaheim, Calif., for roughly 2,600 agency employees in the IRS’s small-business and self-employed division, a unit based in Lanham that assists small-business owners with tax preparation.
The conference cost roughly $4.1 million and was paid for in part with about $3.2 million in unused funds from the IRS’s enforcement budget, a decision that did not violate IRS guidelines, according to aides briefed on the audit.
During the conference, employees watched two training videos that cost at least $60,000 to produce, according to the audit’s estimates. The first video is a “Star Trek” parody and stars division employees discussing how they might identify and address allegations of tax fraud.
The other video shown at the conference had a less elaborate set and cost just $1,600 to produce, according to the Associated Press. It features a group of IRS employees learning how to dance the Cupid Shuffle.
“And I thought doing the Star Trek video was humiliating,” says one of the employees in the video.
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