A representative of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is speaking out on the immense scale of problems faced by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) ranging from outdated infrastructure to massive amounts of wasteful spending.

DOGE deputy Sam Corcos appeared on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle” on Thursday and dropped a number of bombshell revelations about the inner workings of the IRS and U.S. Treasury Department.

Corcos was brought in to look at the IRS’ modernization program, particularly the operations and maintenance budget, which he describes as “30 years behind schedule” and “already $15 billion over budget.”

Corcos described the IRS legacy infrastructure as similar to what banks have been using and the challenges of migrating that to a more modern system, which most banks have already done.

According to Corcos, such an update would typically take a few years to accomplish and would cost a few hundred million dollars, but the IRS is now 35 years and billions of dollars into the program.

Among the other revelations shared by Corcos was the fact that 80% of the IRS’ massive operations budget is eaten up by contractors and licenses, including ghost contracts which bleed millions with no accountability.

Corcos described how the IRS cannot perform its basic functions of tax collection without first “paying a toll” to the various contractors and stated, “You find contracts that are 10, 20, 30, $50 million and you just ask like, why are we doing this? And everyone’s just like, meh, I don’t know. And then you cancel it and then nothing happens. It’s just inertia, has just taken over.”

This means that $2.8 billion of the $3.5 billion annual IRS operation and maintenance budget is going to contractors.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared alongside Corcos for the interview and told host Laura Ingraham, “one of the biggest surprises for me is just seeing how these entrenched interests, they just keep constricting themselves around the power, around the money, around the systems, and nobody cares.”

Bessent explained that his top three priorities for the IRS are “collections, privacy and customer service,” and he argued, “None of those are being well served.”