House Ways and Means Republicans on Friday evening released the video. | POLITICO Screen grab Dance video puts IRS in hot seat

The already scandal-plagued IRS is about to once again feel the political heat from lawmakers — this time for getting its groove on to the “Cupid Shuffle” on the taxpayers’ dime.

House Ways and Means Republicans on Friday evening released an IRS video depicting agency employees line dancing to singer Cupid’s “down, down, do your dance.” The IRS shot the video for entertainment at a 2010 agency conference in Anaheim, Calif.


The release of the video comes just days before the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration — the same watchdog that uncovered IRS employees were targeting conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status — is set to release a report that’s likely to bring a new wave of troubles for the IRS.

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The report is titled “Collected and Wasted: The IRS Spending Culture and Conference Abuses,” and part of it looks at the Anaheim conference. The probe shows the agency spent about $49 million on at least 220 conferences for employees over the past three years, according to a Washington Post report.

House Republicans on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is slated to hold a hearing on IRS conference spending Thursday, will surely use the new video to blast the agency for wasting money.

The video doesn’t lack for theatrics.

Employees in the film are whipped into shape by a colleague yelling, “Get in line now. … Chop, chop!”

“After countless hours of hard work and one broken leg,” the moderator says, the employees end up picking up on the shuffle and have fun.

“They finally got it,” the woman who plays the trainer jokes. “They’re ready for Anaheim!”

But Republicans don’t find it funny.

“Whether it is the tens of thousands of hard-earned taxpayer dollars spent to produce frivolous entertainment for agency bureaucrats, or the IRS’s own admission that it targeted the American people based on their personal beliefs, the outrage toward the IRS is only growing stronger,” said Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany in a statement.

The Louisiana Republican said the video proves the IRS is a place “where abuse and waste is the norm and not the exception.”

New acting IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel is already on the defense. Late Friday, he said the new TIGTA report will show “an unfortunate vestige from a prior era.” Calling the expenses from the conferences “inappropriate,” Werfel emphasized that steps have been taken to make sure similar incidents don’t happen in the future.

“Sweeping new spending restrictions have been put in place at the IRS, and travel and training expenses have dropped more than 80 percent since 2010 and similar large-scale meetings did not take place in 2011, 2012 or 2013,” he said.

Treasury is also emphasizing that changes have been made to curb conference spending, saying in a statement that “beginning in 2011, Treasury leadership increased scrutiny on all bureau travel and conferences and instituted stringent safeguards and policies.”

“Treasury places the highest priority on protecting taxpayer dollars and will continue to strive to operate efficiently and cost-effectively,” the statement said.

After news broke earlier this year that the IRS had used thousands of taxpayer dollars to create “Star Trek” and “Gilligan’s Island” parody videos, Boustany demanded the agency turn over all videos “depicting television or movie parodies.”

The video released Friday came from that request.

The TIGTA report will detail the cost of hundreds of IRS conferences, including the Anaheim conference, price-tagged at $4.1 million and “paid for in part with about $3.2 million in unused funds from the IRS’s enforcement budget,” according to the Post.

That will likely rankle Congressional appropriators, who have heard the IRS over the past two years push for more funding for its enforcement division while warning that more tax cheats would get off scot-free unless their budget is beefed up.

The whole debate should sound familiar. The General Services Administration last year took some heat when the agency was reported to have spent excessive amounts of money at a Las Vegas conference, hiring a clown and a mind reader.

Lawmakers might find little difference with IRS’s expenses on conferences — including funds used to create videos.

In the six-minute “Star Trek” parody, for instance, the make-pretend “Planet Notax” has succumbed to “taxpayer anarchy.” And Starship Enterprise answers the planet’s distress call, sending federal workers to assess the situation and fight the monster: “Tax Gap,” which is actually the amount of money the federal government is owed but doesn’t collect each year.

“Captain, we’ve uncovered a complex tax-evasion scheme using several off-planet accounts,” one reports back to the mother ship through a webcam. “Alien identity theft has gotten out of hand,” reports another to the shuttle. “So far I’ve encountered at least a dozen tax-ians with the same Solar Security number!”