The Internal Revenue Service's Latest Excuse for Stonewalling Congress, and Taxpayers

It’s been more than a year since the scandal of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) targeting non-profit groups for ideological purposes came to light.  Taxpayers are still no closer to any type of meaningful and honest explanation as to why a government agency was able to abuse their power and wreak havoc on Americans attempting to participate in the political process.

TPA has continually called for the release of any and all communications between any IRS officials in the Cincinnati, Ohio field office and the headquarters in Washington, D.C. who had any responsibility with the granting of tax-exempt status to non-profits. These emails are key to discovering how and why the agency was focusing on groups solely based on ideology and who knew what and when regarding the illegal targeting of Tea Party groups.

Now, more than year later after calling on the IRS to embrace transparency regarding the email communications, we have learned that taxpayers will probably never find out the truth regarding what officials at the IRS may have known about the targeting of conservative non-profits because of “lost” e-mails.

On Friday, in the typical Washington style of dropping major news right before the weekend, Congress was informed that the IRS had lost mass amounts of emails from Lois Lerner’s account.  Their explanation  was akin to “the dog ate my homework.”

The Washington Times reported:

The IRS has told Congress that it has lost some of former employee Lois G. Lerner’s emails from 2009 through 2011, including those she sent to other federal agencies, the House’s top tax-law writer said Friday. The agency blamed a computer crash for the mishap. Rep. Dave Camp, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said he was stunned that it took more than a year into the investigation for the IRS to inform Congress that it didn’t have those emails.

The contempt that the IRS has for Congress and the taxpayers is so blatantly obvious and disgusting that people wonder how an agency with such little regard to Americans and the institutions charged with oversight can have so much power and yet be able to simply dismiss concerns when they lose two years worth of emails.

Congress, at least some members of Congress, showed their outrage last week when IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified before the House Ways and Means Committee.  In the hearing it was clear that some members were eager to show just how ridiculous this story about lost emails was and how it didn’t make any sense in the overall narrative of what Congress had been previously told regarding the progress the IRS was making in terms of collecting all the relevant information related to the targeting scandal and the involvement of former IRS official Lois Lerner. Lerner ran the department that oversaw the granting/denying of tax-exempt status to non-profits and the IRS had assured members of Congress that they would be provided with ALL off Lerner’s emails for the time in question.

The IRS is now headed towards some very dangerous territory, talk of a “cover up” regarding the scandal was muted for some time as things remained quiet. But now, as the investigation drags on due to the inability of IRS to provide Congress with the information it has been requesting for almost a year it appears that many inside and outside of Washington are looking at this and wondering what the IRS has been hiding.

Complicating matters even more for the IRS is the fact that the agency had been contracted with a file-storage outfit that stored emails in bulk preserving all email records at IRS. However, questions remain about the length of the contract and how much exactly they had been able to keep in storage. Fox News detailed the quandary for Congress, and the IRS:

The IRS had a contract with email-achiever Sonasoft in effect at least through 2009, according to the website FedSpending.org… However, whether Sonasoft’s government contract extended through 2011 or if the company had the capacity to save every email from such a large agency remains unclear… The agency has said that internal backup tapes are recycled every six months and that Lerner’s hard drive has now been recycled.

Congress is back in session this week and this investigation will continue with multiple hearings aimed at getting to the bottom of how these emails could be lost and why it took the IRS months to notify Congress after telling them they would provide them with all of the Lois Lerner emails. The attitude of the IRS and the White House throughout this scandal has been dismissive and insulting, which makes one wonder how seriously anyone who may have been involved is actually taking this issue.

TPA is adamant in our demand that the IRS comply with Congressional investigators and release any and all communications from anyone who was involved in the granting of tax-exempt status to non-profits. There are too many coincidences that occur each time it seems Congress is about to get to the bottom of this mess.  The need for transparency in government couldn’t be clearer than when looking at the way in which this scandal has unfolded.