Dear IRS, Please Make More Parody Videos

Posted on by Greg Kyte

Everybody can shut the hell up because I love the IRS's Star Trek and Gilligan's Island videos. Don't get me wrong. I regularly benefit from the IRS being a convenient whipping-boy and joke-butt, and these videos suck major donk. But that's why I love them … because the IRS took a risk.

The stink surrounding these two videos–that together are less than 22 minutes long and cost around $60,000 to make–illustrates some of the major problems we're facing as a nation: government spending, eduction, and innovation.
 
First off, the videos are cast as quintessential examples of government waste. Spending $60,000 for IRS employees to dress up like older, uglier versions of the Star Trek crew while delivering sub-laffy-taffy quality jokes and no actual content might SEEM like government waste, but let's put it in perspective.
 
  • It costs $4 million to air one 30-second Super Bowl ad (which does not include production costs). As a result, Beck's Sapphire wasted $4 million making 108 million viewers think that their beer tastes like fish water. 
  • The 2012 movie Battleship cost $209 million to make, so clearly much worse movies have been made for a lot more money1.
  • In 2011 the federal government spent $175,587 to study the effects of cocaine on the mating habits of quail. The study was wasteful, and they didn't even release the video.
  • Just this month the National Institutes of Health awarded a $1.5 million grant to determine why three-quarters of lesbians are obese and why gay males are not. How gay is that?
  • In 1987 the Department of Defense spent $640 for a toilet seat. In 2011 the IRS spent $60,000 on a couple of turds.
     
Not only are there bigger targets than the $60,000 price tag on the IRS parody videos, the IRS also did a decent job defending them. Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) was the first red-faced congressman to demand that the IRS release the videos. The IRS replied to his request, but failed to release the videos for a month-and-a-half. Last week Boustany gave the following statement:
In your letter you state that the IRS’s goal of "making voluntary compliance with the country’s tax laws as easy as possible," requires effective employee training, and further that the IRS’s production studio "allows the IRS to provide education and training to large audiences, both within the IRS and to the public, often while reducing travel and other costs associated with such programs." This explanation sounds both plausible and reasonable.
Yeah. Good answer, IRS. But what pissed off Boustany was the way the IRS was dragging its feet and not coughing up the video; however, the IRS needed that time to edit out the porn.
 
So the next question is, "Did these videos help the IRS effectively train its employees?" Creativity and humor are often cited as effective tools to increase student retention and the overall quality of an educational experience. Now no one can deny that the videos suck ass; however, no one can deny that the IRS has never been more creative or humorous2.
 
Unfortunately, the IRS got the crap kicked out of them for trying to be innovative. We, as a country, are facing immense challenges. We need as much creativity and complex problem solving as possible, and it would be great to see innovative solutions coming out of any governmental agency, especially the IRS. But you don't foster creative problem solving by breaking off your foot in someone's ass when they try something unconventional and fail. Even though the IRS did a reasonable job defending the purpose of the videos, they caved in anticipation of the backlash of public perception and preemptively curtailed any future attempts at creativity.
 
“The IRS has instituted tough new standards for videos to prevent situations similar to the [Star Trek] video,” said the IRS.
 
It's really too bad. I was looking forward to more IRS parodies, like The Schedule A-Team, The Big Bank Theory, and My Three Sunset Provisions.
 
1 Rihanna's sub-par performance gave the movie a black eye. For once, Rihanna gave a black eye. 
2 It's like saying Katy Perry has never been more intellectual than when she finished that chapter book.
 

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After Coasting Through Tax Season, Some IRS Revenue Officers May Have to Start Doing Actual Work

While we’re typically not ones to speculate on the difficulty of any particular job (e.g. CEO of a Big 4 firm) the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (“TIGTA”) probably has the easiest job on Earth.

As far as we can tell, the TIGTA is responsible for criticizing the IRS on, well, pretty much everything that the Service does wrong and then the IRS agrees that they suck and promises to do better.


And if you’re going by the TIGTA website we’re more or less correct:

“TIGTA promotes the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in the administration of the internal revenue laws. It is also committed to the prevention and detection of fraud, waste, and abuse within the IRS and related entities.”

We’re assuming that Doug Shulman probably agree with our assessment but that guy doesn’t even like pizza, so who cares what he thinks?

Anyhoo, the latest Monday Morning QBing from the TIGTA is that some of the Service’s senior revenue officers are basically sitting around with nothing to do. Web CPA reports:

Senior revenue officers at the Internal Revenue Service who are supposed to handle more complicated tax cases oftentimes don’t receive any work assignments, according to a new government report…

The relative lack of work for the senior revenue officers to do occurred because there is no systemic means for IRS managers to identify the most complex cases, and the criteria for identifying complex cases are subjective and inconsistently interpreted.

So you’re a senior revenue officer with 5-6 years (?) on the job. You’ve got this gig pretty much figured out. Not only do you know the ropes, you make the fucking ropes. Your manager has suits from DC so far up their ass about collecting every dime available that they can’t see straight, so they just want you busy do anything.

You, being a reasonably lazy (and realistic) person, aren’t going to kill yourself. If you’ve got the choice of picking up a 1040 that’s hundreds of pages long versus a 1040EZ that has fewer pages that a Tony Alamo pamphlet, you’re going to pick up the 1040EZ.

Well now J. Russell George is slapping those managers around with a report deeming this unacceptable which may mean that your slacking days are over:

“I am troubled that IRS managers are not providing employees with work assignments that they are ready and able to do at a time when it is incumbent on the IRS to be as efficient and effective as possible,” said TIGTA Inspector General J. Russell George in a statement.

JRG is recommending that the IRS improve it’s methods of identifying more complex cases (that the IRS naturally agreed with). We think a tax return thickness analysis is a decent place to start.

IRS Revenue Officers Don’t Have Enough to Do [Web CPA]