Inside DOGE, The IRS & How to Scam the US Government - Sam Corcos

You got a new job. Congratulations.

(laughs) Yeah.

How'd that happen?

I, uh, I had a lot of friends reach out to me from the administration, uh, saying that they really needed help doing, really looking into IRS modernization. It's one of the worst managed IT projects in the government. Uh, I think maybe second only to the VA's attempt at implementing an electronic health records system. Uh, it's about 15 billion dollars over budget. It was actually started right around the time I was born, and it's still ongoing. It's still five years away. It was five years away in 1991, it's still five years away. So, they said they really needed somebody to look into this and see if we could fix it. So, um, I, I've always wanted to do government service. It's a thing that has been important to me. I, I care a lot about the future of the country, especially the national debt. But I, I kind of assumed this would be a thing that I would do in my 50s, after I'm retired, um, but my, my wife really encouraged me to, uh, to give this a go. So about six months ago, I made the plunge and, and here I am. (laughs)

What are you?

I'm, uh, I'm the chief information officer of the Treasury Department. That's my official role.

What's that mean? What's that guy do?

So the chief information officer in, in private companies is usually the CTO, is the, the primary technical leader. In the government, it's the chief information officer.

Mm-hmm.

Um, it's an interesting one. I think a lot of what I've learned is tracking the history of a lot of these things can be interesting. So, the chief information officer really stems from, if you go way back, it stems from when it was effectively a librarian role, if you want to call it that.

Mm.

Where it, the, the, the legacy of chief information officer is when things were in filing cabinets. Where is the information? How do you keep track of this stuff? And it slowly evolved into what it is today. But part of the challenge that I've seen internal to government is that most of the chief information officers, at least before this administration, were non-technical, and the main reason is there's no technical standards or requirements for the role. And so, you can kind of see how you get there where, when it's a librarian role, it's not, there, there's no requirement to really know how computers work.

Mm.

And if you never update the standards, you just sort of fall into the situation.

Is that prescient? That not only were the systems not updated, even the job title wasn't?

I think it's, it's less the job title, it's more the qualifications for the job. Like we have standards for being like the chief counsel of an agency. You have to be a lawyer. I think most people would think that's reasonable. We just never updated that for technology or, in government they really call it IT. That's the, that- that's- that's the more common way they would describe it.