Posted on 03/21/2025 7:59:12 AM PDT by Red Badger
Sam Corcos, a DOGE deputy and special adviser to the U.S. Treasury Department, sat down with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Thursday and unloaded a jaw-dropping exposé on the IRS and Treasury.
Corcos, the co-founder and CEO of Levels—a health-tech company that uses real-time biological data to help people make smarter food choices—was brought in to assess the IRS’s so-called “modernization” effort. What he found? An unaccountable leviathan hemorrhaging of tax dollars.
“A huge part of our government is collecting taxes. We cannot perform the basic functions of tax collection without paying a toll to all these contractors. We really have to figure out how to get out of this hole. We’re in a really deep hole right now,” DOGE representative Sam Corcos said.
Corcos told Ingraham that one of his top priorities during his six-month tenure is to review the IRS modernization program, along with other operational and budgetary matters.
Corcos revealed that the IRS’s so-called modernization project is not only 30 years behind schedule, but also a jaw-dropping $15 billion over budget.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah, I’ve been brought in to look at the IRS’s modernization program in particular, as well as the operations and maintenance budget. I really care a lot about this country, and this is a huge program that’s currently 30 years behind schedule and already $15 billion over budget.
Laura Ingraham:
Wait a second. Explain to our viewers what the program is in layman’s terms.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah. The goal is to take… The IRS has some pretty legacy infrastructure. It’s actually very similar to what banks have been using—old mainframes running COBOL and assembly. The challenge has been: how do we migrate that to a modern system? Virtually every bank has already done this, but we’re still using a lot of those same systems.
Typically, in industry, this takes a few years, maybe a few hundred million dollars. We’re now 35 years into this program. If you ask them now, it’s five years away—and it’s been five years away since 1990. It was supposed to be delivered in 1996, and it’s still five years away.
Corcos was trying to assess the system — but career bureaucrats, many of whom are terrified of accountability, resisted his efforts.
Laura Ingraham:
In your area of expertise, what informs your ability to do this review?
Sam Corcos:
I’m a software developer by background, and I’m a CEO of a software technology company.
Laura Ingraham:
When you came into the department, was the first thing you did to just get into the guts of the system and see how it operates?
Sam Corcos:
Yeah, really talk to the software developers—talk to the people on the ground and see what they’re seeing. I think one encouraging thing is we actually have quite a lot of software talent on the ground—the people writing code. We actually have quite a lot of good people.
It is almost always the case that when I ask them what the correct answer is, how do we solve these problems, they’re almost always right—which is good. They just haven’t been in a position to be empowered to make those decisions. I’m actually pretty optimistic that we can solve this.
WATCH:
VIDEOS AT LINK......................
According to Corcos, the IRS spends a staggering $3.5 billion annually just to keep the lights on—and 80% of that is funneled to outside contractors and licenses.
Sam Corcos:
It’s hard to really grasp the scale of this because we process at the IRS about the same amount of data as a mid-size bank. A typical mid-size bank will have somewhere between 100 and 200 people in IT, and they’ll have an operations and maintenance budget in the $20 million-a-year range.
We have 8,000 people in IT, and our operations and maintenance budget is three and a half billion dollars a year. I don’t really know why yet, but I will tell you that 80% of that budget goes to contractors and licenses.
We cannot perform the basic functions of tax collection without paying a toll to all these contractors. We really have to figure out how to get out of this hole. We’re in a really deep hole right now. How do we turn this around?
We have a three and a half billion dollar operations and maintenance budget. We have a $3.7 billion modernization effort with MIT. That’s a lot of budget, and we are way beyond any reasonable cost for what you would expect of a private company.
When asked by Ingraham what surprised him the most upon stepping into the Department of Treasury, Corcos didn’t mince words.
Sam Corcos:
I would say it’s the disconnect between leadership and the people actually doing the work—that’s a big one. I would say that it doesn’t take a lot, just somebody who cares, to solve these problems. You find contracts that are $10, $20, $30, $50 million, and you just ask, “Why are we doing this?” And everyone’s just like, “I don’t know.” Then you cancel it, and nothing happens. Inertia has just taken over.
Need Jim Nabors meme now.
simpler tax law with fewer changes every year would be a step in the right direction. It was that way many years ago when we filed with paper.
I remember sitting in tax school and the instructor introduced new complex depreciation methods that made no sense. No new tax law passed just a reinterpretation from a needless bureaucrat that was incompetent.
I ignored it and kept doing it the simple way.
The government does nothing well. Except steal.
Flat tax on W-2 wages, no deductions, no filing single or married, no child deductions, no tax credits, easy peasy. Sign a postcard every year acknowledging how much they withheld.
Everyone over a minimum amount pays.
Get rid of the 16th Amendment.
Get rid of the IRS.
National Retail Sales Tax instead.
Very little overhead, everyone pays.
No income tax. Tariffs and possibly a sales tax.
Its taken 18 months for IRS to fix a simple quarterly tax payment error they made on our small business.
Incompetence is the rule at the IRS, not the exception.
And giving these retards a very bloated and complex tax code to manage is to guarantee failure.
Lay off the rest.
I take it you want a massive black market.
It would be a boon to organized crime, so imagine the scale and invasive nature of he police state needed to stop it.
“simpler tax law with fewer changes every year would be a step in the right direction.”
that’s really not the biggest issue because H&R Block and Intuit Turbotax manage to produce filing software every year based on the totality of the tax code plus new changes ... and you can bet hey do all of that for a few million dollars every year, not 35 billion dollars without completion ...
the main problem is incompetent and corrupt bureaucracy at the top that hands out multi-billion dollar contracts to their buddies who have no chance whatsoever of actually completing the contract ... so they just issue ANOTHER corrupt contract to another bunch of their incompetent buddies ...
and no one at the Presidential level ever gave a krap or even demanded accountability for any of the corruption and incompetence ... most likely because at least 10% was going to whatever Big Guy and THEIR buddies who were in charge at the top ...
the fix is pretty simple: put DOGE in charge of software contracts and monitoring, absolute cooperation by the subject departments once the contract is signed [with instant termination of any and all FedGov employees not cooperating], a completion date BEFORE Donald Trump is out of office, and damages that are triple the value of the contract if not completed on time ...
amen!! FLAT TAX, just like the TAX you PAY WHEN YOU BUY SOMETHING! The Poor man and the Billionaire pay the same PERCENTAGE!
I want MUSK to reveal all the Federal employees who are delinquent in their tax payments.
PERHAPS NOT by name-—Will with numbers of overdue payments.
INCLUDING those in Congress. BY NAME THERE
that’s really not the biggest issue because H&R Block and Intuit Turbotax manage to produce filing software every year based on the totality of the tax code plus new changes ... and you can bet hey do all of that for a few million dollars every year, not 35 billion dollars without completion ...
believe me, there is an elite that do not use turbo tax.
I use tax software. The early tax software was written for preparers who understand what the number meant and where it went. A computer gives you an answer, doesn’t mean it is the right one. Ever notice the disclaimers for tax preparation.
I worked with the last good tax auditor who understood taxes before he retired. New people just match numbers and assume the program is right.
It needs to be simple enough for us to understand. The tax laws, not the tax prep program.
1. Eliminate ALL corporate tax.
1a. Eliminate ALL depletion allowances and depreciation allowances.
2. Eliminate ALL current IRS regulations.
3. Set the individual tax rate at 10% regardless of income.
3a. Perquisites at taxed at 10% of cost.
3b. Withhold at the rate of 11%, to get a refund you have to file taxes, but there is no legal imperative to file.
4. Tax ALL money coming into the country at 0% (yes, ZERO%).
5. Tax ALL money leaving the country at 10%.Source here
I like. I think add a small national sales tax if needed. Exempt groceries, some single dwelling homes under a certain amount, and some staple items like non-designer clothing. When the elite buy a new jet, yacht, 25 room mansion, Ferrari, Tom Ford dresses they can afford it.
A national excise tax is the logical adjunct to the repeal of the 16th, but the most important corollary is to then dissolve the so-called “federal reserve” which is monetized by the income tax. You know, “full faith and credit..”?
Then we will no longer be bank slaves.
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