Gowdy: IRS Woes 'Cultural,' Agency Needs to be 'Eviscerated'

Rep. Trey Gowdy attacked the Internal Revenue Service for wasting taxpayer dollars on luxuries — such as trips to conferences and booking presidential suites — and insisted the 151-year-old agency should know better than to waste taxpayer dollars.

"If they can't figure out in that amount of time that you don’t waste money at a conference when your fellow citizens are losing their homes and their jobs and their health insurance, then they need to go away as an entity and be replaced with a more responsible way of collecting revenue," he said on Fox News' "America's Newsroom."

Gowdy already has called for a special prosecutor to probe the IRS for targeting conservative groups.

"The disconnect between this government agency and their inability to grasp fiscal discipline cannot be fixed with a training memo or an inspector general's report. It is cultural, it is character-laden, and it is moral and they need to be eviscerated as a department," he said.

The IRS held 225 conferences from 2010 to 2012, costing taxpayers $49 million, according to The Washington Post, including a pricy trip to Anaheim, Calif., the home of Disneyland, where more than 2,000 employees were indulged with a video parody of Star Trek, keynote speakers who cost more than $135,000, a cocktail reception and gifts.