Tuesday, March 26, 2013

IRS training video spoofs star trek

I hesitated to link to this here as the spoof is so bad.....




It starts:
"Space: the final frontier
These are the voyagers of the Starship Enterprise Y
Its never-ending mission is to seek out new tax forms
To explore strange new regulations
To boldly go where no government employee has gone before."
The six-minute plot that follows is simple: The Enterprise must help the planet “No-tax” that is plagued with money laundering, tax evasion using off-planet accounts and alien identity theft – all due to a “lack of tax leaders.”

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) now admits it was a mistake to spend $60,000 producing the video parodying the 1960s Star Trek television series, along with a second 'Gilligan’s Island' parody. The Star Trek segment was used to open a 2010 training and leadership conference.

Criticised for wasting taxpayers money when the video became public in 2013, the IRS issued a statement that reads:
"The space parody video from 2010 is not reflective of overall IRS video efforts, which provide critical information to taxpayers and cost-effective employee training critical to running the nation's tax system. In addition, the IRS has instituted tough new standards for videos to prevent situations similar to the 2010 video."

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