DOGE has so far ’stopped work and cut about $1.5 billion from the modernization budget,’ the representative said.
A Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) representative said that the IRS has a number of decades-old, infrastructure-related problems and said that recent cuts have allowed the agency to save $1.5 billion.
Speaking to Fox News on Thursday, DOGE representative Sam Corcos said that while “a huge part of our government is collecting taxes,” the IRS “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,” he told Fox anchor Laura Ingraham alongside U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Corcos said that he’s found legacy contracts with outside technology consultants worth tens of billions of dollars for a systems modernization effort that is decades behind schedule.
That plan to modernize the IRS “is a huge program that’s currently 30 years behind schedule, and it’s already $15 billion over budget,” said Corcos, who is also the founder of health technology company Levels. “The IRS has some pretty legacy infrastructure … and the challenge has been how do we migrate that to a modern system?”
The IRS is “now 35 years into this program,” he said elsewhere in the interview. “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,” he added.
“I think we’ve so far stopped work and cut about $1.5 billion from the modernization budget, mostly projects that were putting us down this death spiral of complexity in our code base,” said Corcos, who also serves as a special adviser to the U.S. Treasury.
Both Corcos and Bessent praised the dedication of the IRS staffers, with Corcos saying that they have been “super cooperative” with the cost review. But he said that the agency’s IT costs are far above those of private-sector banks processing similar amounts of data.
