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The Daily Signal
IRS Employees
Erased 422 Backup Tapes Containing 24,000 of Lois Lerner’s Emails
Leah Jessen
June 25, 2015
Investigators at the Internal Revenue Service are looking to agency
employees as the reason thousands of emails from former IRS official
Lois Lerner were lost, and the agency’s watchdog said today their
actions were a mistake.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) J.
Russell George testified before the House Oversight and Government
Reform Committee and told lawmakers IRS employees erased 422 backup
tapes that housed 24,000 emails sent to and from Lerner.
Employees erased the contents of the tapes just a month after IRS
officials were told that thousands of Lerner’s emails were missing
because of a hard drive crash.
In his testimony, George said he “did not uncover evidence that the
erasure was done in furtherance of an effort to destroy evidence or
conceal information from Congress and/or law enforcement.”
Additionally, the IRS watchdog noted that it’s likely the employees
didn’t know about a 2013 directive instructing them not to destroy such
email backup tapes during the investigation.
Despite George’s assurances, Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at
The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal the findings are
troubling.
“Neither the IRS nor the Justice Department, which has supposedly been
investigating the IRS targeting of conservative organizations, would
tolerate the destruction of over 400 backup tapes and 24,000 emails,”
he said. “They would be in court trying to have an individual American
or a business charged with destruction of evidence.”
“This is particularly egregious because it happened after the IRS had
received a subpoena and a protective order prohibiting the destruction
of the emails,” von Spakovsky continued. “I also have a hard time
believing that IRS officials did not know this was wrong—everyone in
the agency knew about the Lerner scandal and the investigation.”
Investigation into Lerner’s emails began after George released an audit
two years ago detailing IRS agents’ heavy scrutiny of applications from
tea party and conservative groups filing for tax-exempt status.
Lerner was head of the division overseeing tax-exempt organizations
during the time the groups were targeted. She retired from the tax
agency in 2013.
Last year, the IRS told Congress that Lerner’s hard drive had crashed
in 2011, resulting in the loss of thousands of emails sent during the
same time period the groups were singled out.
Since then, the IRS has been able to produce 78,000 emails from Lerner
that were originally discovered missing.
Read this and other articles with links at The Daily Signal
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