The Internal Revenue Service has entered an area where many have gone before—the world of bad videos.
A recent Congressional committee that the IRS spent $60,000 of taxpayer money on not one, but two employee training videos parodying Star Trek and Gilligan’s Island that didn’t have a whole lot of employee training at all. The investigation forced the IRS to admit the videos were a mistake.
“If you have to get in and decide which corny spoof video of a television show that no longer exists is maybe for training purposes for tax collection, you’ve already lost it,” said Ari Melber Monday.
The organization defended its Gilligan’s Island spoof, saying it served as a valuable training video at a fraction of the cost of traditional employee training.
“It’s not so much how much they spent,” said S.E. Cupp. “It is how much they spent and what we got for it. This is not a good movie.”
This is not the first video done but the IRS and certainly won’t be the last, said NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell.
“But when it came to the spoof on Star Trek that seemed to go a little too far, according to the committee, and the IRS says its tightening control to make the best use of the production and not do something like this again,” she said.
Abby Borovitz