Report: IRS Destroyed Hard Drives With Lerner Emails
Yet more adventures in bad records retention policy at the IRS.
Politico is reporting that IRS sources have indicated that the missing Lois Lerner emails that have become the subject of the latest round of controversy in the ongoing IRS political targeting scandal will likely never be recovered because the hard drive on her computer was recycled:
Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightening rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources.
“We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a brief hallway interview.
Two additional sources told POLITICO the same late Wednesday, citing IRS officials.
It may just be standard government procedure, but the revelation is significant because some lawmakers and observers thought there was a way that tech experts could revive Lerner’s emails after they were washed away in a computer crash in the summer of 2011. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), for example, subpoenaed her damaged hard drive earlier this week, when he asked for “all hard drives, external drives, thumb drives and computers” and “all electronic communication devices the IRS issued to Lois G. Lerner.”
“IT experts have weighed in and said yes — we can get those” emails, said Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) earlier Wednesday.
The latest news suggests such professionals may never get the chance to try again — and the IRS has even said its criminal investigators who specialize in rebuilding hard drives to recover hidden information from criminals were unable to restore the data back in 2011. But this is only likely to further enrage Republicans, who are fuming over the matter and suspect Washington officials drove the selective scrutiny.
The IRS told congressional investigators on Friday that the emails of Lerner, the former head of the tax exempt division that was found to have singled out conservative groups for additional scrutiny, were lost from 2009 to 2011 in a computer hard drive crash in early summer 2011. IRS chief John Koskinen will face angry Republicans at a hearing on Friday.
The time frame is significant because the tea party targeting began in spring of 2010, and Republicans think if there was a smoking gun connecting the Obama administration to the IRS treatment of conservative groups, it could be found during that period.
“We believe the standard IRS protocol was followed in 2011 for disposing of the broken hard drive. A bad hard drive, like other broken Information Technology equipment, is sent to a recycler as part of our regular process,” an IRS spokesman said in response to a query from POLITICO.
On Wednesday, the White House retorted that for the time frame in which Lerner’s emails are missing, there are no direct communications between 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and the now-retired Lerner.
Earlier this week, Ways and Means Republicans said as many as six IRS employees involved in the scandal also lost email in computer crashes, including the former chief of staff for the acting IRS commissioner.
That’s because before May 2013, the IRS backed up emails only for six months on a tape, then recycled the tapes, so they essentially threw out the data. Many agencies do the same, transparency experts say.
As I’ve said before, there really two issues at play here, both of which deserve attention notwithstanding the partisan tone that the entire IRS targeting controversy has taken over the past year.
The first, obviously, is the issue of the IRS failing to respond to Congressional oversight inquiries. In the end, regardless of party, one of Congress’s most important jobs is oversight of Federal agencies, especially one that reaches into American life as much as the Internal Revenue Service. For months, the agency was saying that it did have all of Lerner’s emails but needed time to properly retrieve them from archives and compile them. Now they’re saying that some not insubstantial portion of those communications is missing because they were not centrally stored as generally required by Federal records retention laws, although the agency may have been in compliance with its own policies in that area. When agencies start playing games like this, it’s not really that shocking that people aren’t going to find it credible and believe they have something to hide, and this is arguably doubly true. At the very least, then an incident like this warrants a review of records retention policies at government agencies and their compliance with document requests from Congressional Committees.
In addition to hindering oversight, the IRS’s actions here are going to do nothing more than pour gasoline on the fire of this story, which probably didn’t need much more fuel in any case. As I’ve already noted, their explanations are being laughed at by even the non-Fox news media and the news about destroyed hard drives isn’t likely to help that situation. The IRS Commissioner, who wasn’t on the job when all of this started in 2011, will be back on Capitol Hill tomorrow and next week, and this will obviously be the focus of the inquiries. Even if there is an innocent explanation, it’s still going to leave a bad impression regarding the overall scandal, and that’s just going to serve to ensure that it remains a story going forward.
When you get right down it, this would have been a lot simpler if the IRS had just been more forthright about the difficulty in recovering the volume of emails that the committee was requesting.
No one madder and upset about the missing emails and destroyed hard drive than IRS and Lois Lerner.
The emails would have completely exonerated them and proved this was just Republican Witch Hunt. đ
Like the 18 missing minutes would have done for Nixon.
No one, but no one, ever learns- just put the bad news out there. It ain’t gonna improve with age, it’ll just stink worse.
The obvious question is was this in keeping with their standard records retention policy? Wait, not even that: the hard drive crashed and recovery efforts had failed. So they were supposed to do what with it, exactly?
I can only imagine the headlines if/when it came out that such devices were routinely kept in storage or something.
“IRS spends $X/yr. on worthless busted hardware!”
But I agree with what you say about the way the IRS has handled things. Saying they had the emails and just needed time and then admitting they don’t have them was not a good move. Always tear off the bandaid, and explain what happened forthrightly.
@ Paul L.
The ongoing effort by the right to draw Watergate comparisons where none exist does little except to make sure that none of this is taken seriously outside the Foxverse.
@anjin-san: You’re right, this is nothing like Watergate.
For example, Nixon tried and failed to use the IRS against his political enemies. Since then, we’ve learned that the trick is to put people with a track record of using their appointed office to go after their political enemies (Lois Lerner and her tenure at the FEC) in place FIRST.
@ Jenos
So what you are saying is that you are just as dim as you were yesterday, and the day before.
Got it.
Say, now you have an opportunity to spend the rest of the day whining that I am not engaging in the faux debate that you want to have. Life is good!
@anjin-san: Oh, annie, it’s just not a fun day without seeing your slathering attempts to cover up for the Obama administration.
But to sum up, the Operational Statements on the Lerner e-mails, in chronological order:
1) “We have the e-mails, but we need some time to pull them all together.”
2) “Oops! We lost them two years ago in a hard drive crash. But we really, really tried to get them back!”
3) “We tried really, really hard to get them back, but when we couldn’t, we tossed the drive in the trash.”
So, basically, the dog ate their homework, and then the dog got run over by a bakery truck…
And if you take the IRS’ constantly-evolving truths at face value, they’re still admitting that they violated federal law regarding records retention. So their defense is “we broke that law, but we didn’t break the other laws, trust us.”
@anjin-san: Don’t bother baby Jenos. He’s playing with his shiny little toy.
@Jenos Idanian #13: Maybe this would be a good time to lecture on us how you never cared about the IRS thing, and that the only messages you posted were to point out that Doug was ignoring the issue.
We all know the pattern by now. You get all fussy over some pet issue that Hotair or Redstate is bloviating about, you post message after message examining all the “detail” you can invent or misunderstand, you crow about how superior you are to the Obamabots, and then when the whole thing blows up in your face you disappear, refuse to post, and then insist that you never cared about the issue, you were just proving our hypocrisy.
So why don’t you go ahead and save yourself some typing and go straight to the message about how you never cared about any of the IRS stuff. Really, no one here will miss the middle stages… and we’ll all have exactly the same amount of respect for you afterwards.
@ wr
Bingo!
So this was Issa’s effort to avoid having to give Lerner immunity for testimony he’s not sure will give him anything, right?
I mean, IRS shenanigans aside, that’s pretty much the only step available to him if he honestly thinks there was administration wrongdoing. If he doesn’t honestly think that, this whole thing has been a witch-hunt from the start.
@ wr
I⊠sniff never liked George Zimmerman sniff, sniff and you know it. It’s just that I care deeply about justice and truth, or I… sob⊠I never would have even talked about him in the first place⊠You guys are so mean, but you are not as cool as you think you are. I am the cool one sniff, sob…
Remember when President Obama fired the Acting Director of the IRS right after this scandal broke? Then, remember when President Obama said that there was “not even a smidgeon of corruption” in the IRS scandal? I bet that guy really appreciated getting fired over nothing. Thanks Obama!
@Doug:
They turned over the e-mails from the 6mos rolling backup, Lerner’s 500MB-limited Exchange server account, from her current computer’s .PST archives, and then they spent a great deal of time and effort recovering e-mails that wouldn’t be in her .PST archives (because of the 2011 HDD failure) by digging through every other IRS employee’s Exchange accounts & local .PST archives (this recovered 24,000 additional Lerner e-mails). The White House has also complied with requests for any Lerner e-mails/communications on their end.
The deception here isn’t from the IRS, who’ve gone to ridiculous lengths to comply with the GOP’s fishing expedition. The actual deceit is from congressional Republicans, who’ve wasted massive amounts of government resources & taxpayer money and found nothing, and consequently were pleased as punch to discover Lerner’s 2011 HDD failure, which allows them to invent fictional e-mails, in the minds of their credulous dupes, that surely must have been there, and that prove their evidence-free conspiracy theories.
Jesus Christ, I’m getting tired of this shit.
Really? Simpler in what way? In what universe? If it hadn’t been this, it would have been something else. The only way this could have been better by the standards you’ve been laying out, was if the IRS was expressly partisan, and would be considering partisan politics in every statement they make.
The only sin here was making a declarative statement before having the emails in hand. They should have said something like “It will take time, but we will of course comply and supply whatever relevant emails we have. We’ll know what we have that’s relevant once we’ve gone through everything. We’ll get back to you.” But it apparently didn’t occur to them to be weaselly, just as they didn’t immediately recall a computer crash from 3 YEARS previously. Should they have remembered sooner? I don’t know. If they just got to work on the problem, and worked their way backwards, they may not have realized until they got to that time period, and it may have taken this long to work their way back that far.
But this, this is just ridiculous. When you first heard of the crash, did you honestly think the hard drive might still be around? Why? What organization would store something like that? For 3 YEARS? And these IT “professionals” claiming they could recover the data are no different than Frist diagnosing Schiavo via videotape. It’s lunacy.
I know what my preferred response would be to congressional questioning on this. “You’re absolutely right. We should save all old and/or damaged computer equipment in perpetuity, and should augment our current archives to save absolutely everything in one place, with multiple redundant copies in case of disaster. I will get people right on that once funding is in place. When can we expect appropriations?”
During my 24 years in the active duty military, there were several times where I lost all of my emails … either due to computer crashes, or my account getting “accidentally” deleted while I was deployed overseas. Also, when a computer breaks, or is replaced due to age, it is required (for security purposes) that the hard drives be destroyed before the computer is disposed of (whether to the landfill or to DRMO to possibly be sold).
None of this is to imply that that there couldn’t be some nefarious circumstance behind the disappearance of Ms. Lerner’s emails. However to pretend that a computer crashing and the hard drive being destroyed is an unusual event is just not consistent with what I know to happen in the real world.
How long have conservatives been telling us the government is incompetent, that they screw up everything they touch?
Now, suddenly, if a government agency does not face a bulletproof backup system in place, it is proof positive of a conspiracy and the persecution of conservatives – not simply another inevitable government fiasco.
You might even think that partisan politics is playing a larger role here than a simple search for the truth.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
So…this is worse than Watergate???
Bwah….hahahahahahahahaha….
And in other news, I no longer own a laptop with a dead screen from 3 years ago either…
Here’s some facts…
This past Tuesday the House Appropriations Committee released its spending bill…and it cuts the IRS budget, substantially….$10.95 billion for the agency, $341 million below last year’s level and $1.5 billion below what Obama requested. It is, the committee boasts, below sequestration-level funding…below spending for the last 7 years.
So…let’s get this straight…Republicans want to drown the Government in a bath-tub, are sure the Government cannot do anything competently, and yet are totally surprised by this turn of events.
Seriously….the GOP has turned into a parody of circus-clowns…real circus-clowns aren’t this stupid.
The IRS is chronically underfunded and has been for years…what a shock…and that under-funding likely leads to lost hard-drives…but more importantly it contributes to the deficit because of lax enforcement.
@C. Clavin:
Lax enforcement is what they want. Many of those who would declare young children “criminals” for daring to cross our borders in search of a better life, simultaneously feel it is their constitutional right to not get caught cheating on their taxes.
And one more thing before I continue to ignore this Fig Newton of Darrell Issa’s imagination…
I just don’t get this…I pay taxes…and once a year I have to report what I made and what taxes I have paid. This is not hard…it’s not reaching into my American life so much…and in comparison to the things I get in return…the FAA, food inspections, drug testing and regulation, roads, bridges, Nat’l Security, science and space programs, protection of our natural resources, response to natural disasters, benefits for our veterans…it’s friggin’ nothing.
I’ve also paid taxes as an independent contractor…so it happens 4 times a year (quarterly)…big f’ing deal.
If this is really a crisis for you then it’s because you are doing something wrong.
That’s about it. I spend an hour or two with my accountant, we grab some lunch, and he does the rest. I don’t even have to go see him if I am too busy, he has an online portal for all the docs, and we file electronically. Next year I will get set up for direct deposit refunds if we get anything back.
On a scale of one to ten of difficult projects, it’s about a 3. There have been a few years where I had a large tax bill and not enough cash on hand to write a check. Get on the phone, spend 30 minutes setting up a payment plan, and pay a modest penally & interest. Again, not a big deal.
@anjin-san:
30 minutes on the phone with customer service is pretty close to the gulag, if you ask me..
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Sure, and “Benghazi!” was the worst foreign policy disaster in the history of our country.
Don’t fret though, you guys still have over 2 years to impeach Obama, The votes are there, and the House majority doesn’t need (or want) an impeachable offense to get the job done. There probably will not be enough votes in the Senate to convict. Wow, does that sound familiar.
@Jeremy R:
They’re playing the Harry Reid “Mitt Romney didn’t pay any taxes” card. It gins up plenty of discussion and makes people look bad, but there’s nothing of substance.
@CB: “30 minutes on the phone with customer service is pretty close to the gulag, if you ask me..”
Apparently it’s been a few years since MR had tax issues. You can do it all on line now.
I wonder if those of you who are fine and dandy with what happened at thebIRS would be singing the same song had this been a republican administration targeting liberal groups and the “oops we lost the most important emails from the most important time period” came up from the IRS?
Also, Lerner has already broken some federal laws because the discs sent to the FBI had taxpayer information that the IRS isn’t supposed to give to anyone without a court order. It was during this period of collusion that the important emails went missing.
Oh and the IRS just happened to lose the emails of 6 other figures involved at the same time with similar crashes.
But you guys just keep pretending there is no scandal here.
@Todd: The individual email user can save email to their computer and print email as needed. This is often left to the discretion of the user. The real deal is how emails are handled on the server and the server backup strategy. This is a policy decision and the user has no reason to even know what the policy is and what the backup schedule and retention period are.
I got my DDN access card in 1989. (Still have it.) The server was in Indianapolis and I was about 800 miles from there. As a user I had no idea what happened at the server end. At that time there was a difference of opinion whether email was even official correspondence. Some commanders in the field did not accept guidance via email. They needed signed letter correspondence for anything that was directive in nature. I do not know how this was eventually resolved or what the official Army policy on email was.
@Just Me:
Because there is no scandal! If it was a Republican administration that “persecuted” liberal tax-exempt groups, there would have been similar uproar. But I like to think that years later, after the facts emerged, that those liberals would be regarded as loons.
@ Just Me
Why is it that the primary interest conservatives have in government is ferreting out “scandals”, and only ones that might damage Obama at that? Why not roll up your sleeves and get involved in the difficult business of actually running the country?
As I understand it they turned over all the emails that fell under the standard retention policy. They were backed up and easily accessible. Then the Repubs wanted more. So they searched old backups and eventually tried to recover what they could from her computer. They turned over more than 10,000 emails they were able to recover. Under the law they were not obligated to retain even one of those emails. Eventually they worked their way back to the computer drive and found that a couple of thousand emails were lost in a crash. Some tech gave her a new hard drive then reformatted the old one and reused it.
That’s the Republican scandal. As usual, just bullish*t. Nothing here whatsoever.
@Just Me: first, they did give extra scrutiny to liberal groups, and unless things have changed in government service, even the higher ups don’t get anything close to top of the line machines. Even in the private sector it’s not uncommon for people in the same group to have their laptops all go bad around the same time. When someone in my group at work has their hard drive crash we all start being extra careful about dropping emails into our process database because we know that within a few months, half of us will have our laptops replaced, and while the IT guys are fairly good at recovering stuff, often times, things don’t make it over.
Funny that Jenos uses the term ‘political enemies’. This entire scandal is about the IRS’s process in deciding whether or not Tea Party groups should be tax-exempt for purposes of social welfare. And yet every Republican thinks that it’s obvious that Obama instructed the IRS to go after the Tea Party because they were his enemies. But Obama’s IRS singled out the Tea Party groups because they entertained the crazy thought that their sole purpose was to elect a Republican.
The ‘singled out’ part of the equation is called the rules. The GOP is at the point of saying that it’s against the law to expect the rules to be followed, or understood, if you’re a member of the Tea Party.
Also, if Obama really wanted to go after his enemies, they would be in serious trouble. How long would Chris Christie or Scott Walker last with the NSA on their asses? Like four days. And Karl Rove? Or the Koch brothers? Look at Dinesh D’Souza, or Conrad Black, who occasionally pops up at the National Review. You could get rid off fifty-percent of conservative think-tankers simply by taking a look at expense accounts.
It’s not that the Democrats are that much cleaner, but the GOP’s standards are so very low and their followers are so used to following that they don’t even care.
The “liberal groups were targeted too” defense is a myth.
http://oversight.house.gov/release/new-oversight-report-debunks-myth-liberal-groups-targeted-irs/
The IRS and Lerner absolutely did send multiple discs to the FBI to try to drum up some prosecutions. The justice department has informed congress that some of the information on them is confidential taxpayer information that was illegally provided. This occurred about the time when Lerner’s and 6 other IRS employees had their hard drives corrupted with all their emails on them.
Pretty darn convenient.
But let’s continue to pretend like nothing was happening-good thing Holder is at Justice he will make sure nothing gets actually investigated.
@Just Me:
Um, no one takes Issa seriously, for very good reason.
I asked you for a cite the last time you said this; I’ll ask again. I do not believe this is true. In particular, I do not believe that the law requires centralized storage of anything.
Yolo Contendere has it right — they’ve been working their way backwards through the email history for a year now. It takes so long because there are so freaking many emails to deal with, each of which must be reviewed for relevance and for redaction of content that is subject to disclosure restrictions. That review has to be done by the live eyeballs of a trained specialist — one of the 250 IRS employees who have been totally useless to the taxpaying public for the past year, working on this fiasco instead.
When they hit the gap caused by the 2011 hard drive crash, they told Congress about it immediately, and did everything they could to find copies of as many of the missing emails as possible. From the Republicans’ point of view, this was the best possible outcome — a plastic facsimile of a smoking gun that can pass for the real thing at a distance. Far better than actually getting all of those emails, in which case they’d have had to fall back on the “phone or in person” unfalsifiable claim.
@Just Me:
I followed your link, and I almost hurt myself laughing.
Well, that’s certainly a fair test, and exactly analogous to having the phrase “Tea Party” in your organization’s name. You do realize that what this really says is “the word ‘progressive’ is not a useful bullet-list word for flagging applications”, right? Unlike, say, “Tea Party”.
And where the IRS flagged Tea Party-affiliated groups for scrutiny, evidence shows that it did so for objective, non-political reasons — namely, that groups with “Tea Party” in the name tend not to qualify for the tax-exempt status they are seeking. Unlike, say, groups with the word ‘progressive’ somewhere in their application.
Sheesh.
And before you bring it up again, I actually agree with you about the unauthorized disclosures. The law there is clear, and the responsible parties should suffer the usual consequences.
ironically they have my tax data from back then, just in case they need to use it for something worth they’re while.
in other news my yahoo account holds my emails forever, unless i delete them. and it’s FREE!
Oh, it’s nice to be missed… I’d say I missed you all, too, but I was actually having fun yesterday in meatspace.
First up, I actually am a bit invested in this mess. For one, it’s actually got you all on the defensive, as you scramble to find excuses for the Obama administration. For another, we’re dealing with agencies of the federal government attempting to suppress people from participating in the political process.
Second, the budget thing? The IRS had plenty of money for travel, conferences, performance bonuses, and God knows what else, but didn’t have enough money to comply with federal laws regarding record-keeping? When Vox posted an article titled “The IRS scandal shows the IRS needs a bigger budget,” Iowahawk totally brutalized that thought in a brilliant series of Tweets:
And it turns out that pretty much anyone else whose e-mails were subpoenaed were also lost in hard drive crashes. I guess they were all using Lerner’s laptop too, huh?
@Tillman:
“So this was Issaâs effort to avoid having to give Lerner immunity for testimony heâs not sure will give him anything, right?
I mean, IRS shenanigans aside, thatâs pretty much the only step available to him if he honestly thinks there was administration wrongdoing. If he doesnât honestly think that, this whole thing has been a witch-hunt from the start. ”
Agreed.
If they gave a serious grant of immunity, she’d have no Fifth Amendement basis for refusal. This could be quite evil, since it means that they could have a tag-team of lawyers question her for a hundred hours or more.
@CB: “30 minutes on the phone with customer service is pretty close to the gulag, if you ask me.. ”
30 minutes with Comcast is just entering the first circle of the Abyss.
@Just Me: The IRS was targeting groups from both ends of the spectrum, and from what I’ve gathered did so for good reasons.
@Barry: Here’s one explanation for Issa’s position (pure speculation on my part):
He’s convinced that Lerner wasn’t just a peon, but a genuine bad egg in her own right. (And there is plenty of evidence of that, going back to her days at the FEC.) So he’s interested in seeing her get justice, and would really not like to let her off scot-free. So one possible strategy is to find enough incriminating evidence on her without her cooperation, so instead of immunity, he has a plea bargain to offer. So he goes after her e-mails, knowing that federal law requires that they be preserved for just such instances.
But oops! — the IRS screwed up and lost them. And — oops again! — they also got rid of the only hard drive that contained it. And — darn it, oops one more time! — they’ve also lost the e-mails of several other people apparently involved with Lerner and the whole mess.
The IRS’ reputation has really taken a dive since Obama was elected. First a confessed tax cheat was installed as Treasury Secretary, then the whole Tea Party targeting scandal, and now they can’t be bothered to live up to the record-keeping standards they demand of us taxpayers, let alone the federally-mandated standards.
Now might be a good time to push repealing the 16th Amendment and replacing it with a national sales tax.
@Modulo Myself: “Also, if Obama really wanted to go after his enemies, they would be in serious trouble. How long would Chris Christie or Scott Walker last with the NSA on their asses? ”
And I’d bet that the NSA would be quite happy to do some dirty work for Obama, because then they’d have a hold on him.
@Just Me: “The âliberal groups were targeted tooâ defense is a myth.”
Citing a House report.
@C. Clavin: @anjin-san: I just donât get thisâŠI pay taxesâŠand once a year I have to report what I made and what taxes I have paid. This is not hard
Thatâs about it. I spend an hour or two with my accountant, we grab some lunch, and he does the rest. I donât even have to go see him if I am too busy, he has an online portal for all the docs, and we file electronically. Next year I will get set up for direct deposit refunds if we get anything back.
Ah, the beauties of withholding. You two only think about taxes once a year. The rest of us look at every single pay stub and see how much we are paying in taxes.
And that refund? That’s the government giving you back your own money after it borrowed it for a year as an interest-free loan.
@Barry: Citing a House report.
Oh, there’s your error. Since the House is controlled by Republicans, anything and everything that they produce is automatically discredited. In order for something to have any credibility, it has to be produced by Democrats or a disinterested, neutral third party — like some liberal think tank or policy groups.
Now if you could get the Soros-funded Media Matters to say that the IRS targeted Tea Party groups, then you’d have some credibility around here. But the House of Representatives? Fugeddaboudit.
At which point you’d have to face Plan B: The Republicans did it first.
@bill: “in other news my yahoo account holds my emails forever, unless i delete them. and itâs FREE! ”
Do you *know* that?
@Jenos Idanian #13: “Heâs convinced that Lerner wasnât just a peon, but a genuine bad egg in her own right. (And there is plenty of evidence of that, going back to her days at the FEC.) So heâs interested in seeing her get justice, and would really not like to let her off scot-free. So one possible strategy is to find enough incriminating evidence on her without her cooperation, so instead of immunity, he has a plea bargain to offer. So he goes after her e-mails, knowing that federal law requires that they be preserved for just such instances.”
First, anybody who knows anything would know that to work your way up the ladder, you’ll need to grant immunity to some bad eggs.
Second, you don’t know what federal law requires for back-ups and retentions.
Third, Issa has a record here, and it’s one of rampant dishonesty.
“The IRSâ reputation has really taken a dive since Obama was elected. First a confessed tax cheat was installed as Treasury Secretary, then the whole Tea Party targeting scandal, and now they canât be bothered to live up to the record-keeping standards they demand of us taxpayers, let alone the federally-mandated standards. ”
No.
“Now might be a good time to push repealing the 16th Amendment and replacing it with a national sales tax. ”
You’re a f-ing idiot – have a friend who knows how to google to look for some explanations as to why that’s a crackpot idea.
@Jenos Idanian #13: “Oh, thereâs your error. Since the House is controlled by Republicans, anything and everything that they produce is automatically discredited. In order for something to have any credibility, it has to be produced by Democrats or a disinterested, neutral third party â like some liberal think tank or policy groups. ”
Let me repeat myself: Issa has a track record. For example, early on in just this ‘scandal’, he had a bunch of IRS guys testify, and refused to release an unredacted transcript. He released an edited one.
@Barry:
Now 30 minutes on the phone with Verizon would be seventh heaven. Usually 30 minutes and you’re still listening to music with interruptions about how important you are even though you’ve still got another hour to go before speaking with someone.
@Jenos Idanian #13: Oh Iowahawk. Smart person on a first glance, lunatic on a second. Comparing a reduction of a billion dollars and ten percent of a workforce in an operating budget to being drunk and ramming a car into someone’s living room – that’s conservative humor for you.
Ooh, where’d you read this one?
@Tillman: The first place I heard about it was a link to the Daily Caller, but here’s an ABC News report that shows the same thing: the IRS “lost” e-mails from six other people tied into the whole mess.
@Tillman: Comparing a reduction of a billion dollars and ten percent of a workforce in an operating budget to being drunk and ramming a car into someoneâs living room â thatâs conservative humor for you.
So they couldn’t afford to comply with the law? Novel excuse. I’ll have to try it on my bank next month.
“So, you see, I don’t have the money for my mortgage this month. Sorry.”
“But our records show you have plenty of funds in this separate account, Mr. Idanian.”
“But that’s my BH fund — Beer and Hookers Fund. I can’t use that for anything else.”
@Jenos Idanian #13: Hilariously, if you lost ten percent of your body and most of your money paying for medical bills, your bank probably would give you an extension.
@Jenos Idanian #13: Actually, I failed to notice how it was mentioned in the original article Doug wrote too.
@Tillman: But back to the point — are you actually arguing that the IRS couldn’t afford to obey the law?
The agency had plenty of money for travel, conferences, and performance bonuses couldn’t afford to obey the law?
Since that “draconian” budget cut, they spent $49 million on conferences alone — including that brilliant “Star Trek” video — but they couldn’t afford to obey the law?
If you can rationalize that, then I see why Iowahawk’s observations went right over your head.
Here’s another thought: if those budget cuts are indeed the reason for the failure to comply with the federal laws regarding record-keeping, did anyone ever raise that point prior to this? Is there a single IRS official on record as saying that the budget cuts are keeping them from complying with the law?
Hell, I don’t think one of them has made that yet. All the comments above seem to be just speculation, not based on any facts.
@ Jenos
Hmm. Just the other day, you were telling us that your trashing of POW Bowe Bergdahl was just speculation, so you did not need facts and that that was just fine.
@ Jenos
Uh, Skippy? I’ve been a 1099 guy for the last two years.
Refunds are a pretty rare event around here. We have written some pretty hefty checks to the IRS over the years.
@Jenos Idanian #13: FY2010 was October 2009 to September 2010. You have to remember fiscal years are weird creatures. The August 2010 conference was the tail end of FY2010, and the funds for the conference and the Star Trek video were taken from unused tax enforcement money. The budget battles started in 2011 after the 2010 Tea Party wave. Sequestration hit them in 2012 like every other domestic non-military agency, and they’ve had their budget cut every year since. So, complaining about their conferences misses the point temporally.
If you’re bleeding workers and money, you start taking shortcuts. The screening process that led to this faux-scandal was created because the agency lacked workers. Iowahawk’s comparison of the IRS to a drunk driver is misleading because funding the IRS better would, to use the analogy, sober the driver up. They broke the law by not printing every email that came through their offices, sure, and they should be rebuked for it. (Too bad they don’t have NSA-level money for data centers.) But elevating $49 million dollars spent on conferences to the level of high mismanagement…
To get a sense of scale, you’re complaining about $49 million dollars (over a three-year period, so an average of little more than $16 million a year) in a yearly budget of around $12 billion. The WaPo article brings up how they failed to negotiate lower hotel rates. What a crime!
Yea, I’m failing to see a valid reason for outrage here. Conventions, conferences, seminars – all part of the life of any working professional. 16 million? Let’s compare that to the multi billion dollar subsidies for the rich beyond the dreams of avarice oil companies, or the half trillion dollars that has been poured down the joint strike fighter rathole.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Uh, yeah. Check out the Commissioner’s testimony today before the House Ways and Means Committee. In particular, they are way underfunded to obey the law that says they’re supposed to collect all of the taxes that are owed…
@DrDaveT: You kinda skipped my main point, and answered my afterthought:
if those budget cuts are indeed the reason for the failure to comply with the federal laws regarding record-keeping, did anyone ever raise that point prior to this?
Bringing this up after the fact makes it look a bit convenient. I was wondering if anyone had said, at some point in the past three years, something like “these budget cuts are hurting our ability to even comply with the legal record-keeping requirements,” because that would give them a bit of credibility.
And that’s an asset they’re seriously hurting for, especially since they’ve been saying they had these e-mails for some time, but found out months ago about this failure, and only admitted it last week.
Were I a bit more conspiracy-minded, I might speculate that those e-mails were so damning, so flagrant and blatant, that the powers-that-be said “go ahead and destroy them; whatever heat we get for not producing them will in no way be as bad as the heat we’ll get if they’re released. Besides, we can always count on the useful idiots to cover for us.”
Good thing I’m not quite that conspracy-minded…
Poor Jenos, still desperately seeking the scandal that is actually, you know, a scandal. I’m sure Hannity has an update for you pal, be sure to tune in so that you will know what you think.
Where are you anyway? You sprinted away from the Benghazi discussion so fast you must have crossed several time zones by now…
@anjin-san: Where are you anyway? You sprinted away from the Benghazi discussion so fast you must have crossed several time zones by nowâŠ
Kinda hard to “sprint away” from somewhere I never was… but I’m certain I was mentioned repeatedly by those who are in no way whatsoever obsessed with me…
And an even more interesting timeline has developed regarding Lerner’s hard drive… I’ll be back later tonight/tomorrow morning with the latest Statement That Is Operative, supplanting Previous Statements That Are No Longer Operative.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
You promising to post nonsense isn’t really news.
@DrDaveT:
OK, a minor correction to myself. According to today’s testimony, they spotted the email gap in February, spent March and April seeing how much of the lost email they could recover, and told Congress in June when they delivered the recoverable emails.
You have to love the Republican rep who tried to get Koskinen to admit that he couldn’t prove Lois Lerner didn’t deliberately disable her own computer… before turning it over to forensic data recovery experts.
And the IRS has held a contract with an email server provider that tours it’s archiving since 2005 and even used it’s contract with the IRS to advertise.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fP0HJB3wjgUJ:reason.com/blog/2014/06/20/the-irs-had-a-contract-with-an-email-bac+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Somebody needs to explain why Lerner’s emails weren’t being used or stored in the server the IRS was paying to archive the emails from the IRS.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
As with the hard drive crash, it only looks like “after the fact” if you haven’t been paying attention, for years.
Yes, the IRS has repeatedly told Congress over the past couple of decades that their budget shortfalls are keeping them from doing their job properly. Even GAO, who normally plays the role of hatchet man when talking about the IRS, has gone on record repeatedly that the IRS is under-funded for their mission. The National Taxpayer Advocate has been reporting since at least 2006 that IRS funding shortfalls are making it impossible for them to staff “nonessential” functions like help desks and taxpayer support forums. Hiring freezes on and off over the last decade have greatly reduced the staffing of many departments at the IRS — even as the workload increases, driven by unfunded Congressional mandates that have the IRS administering welfare programs so that weaselly Congressmen can claim never to have voted for a welfare program.
Independent estimates of the return on investment to additional IRS funding range from a mere 300% to as much as 700%. Given the federal budget situation, the funding levels Congress has approved can only be seen as deliberate sabotage of the deficit. Even half of the $450 billion in uncollected taxes every year would make an enormous difference.
I think this pretty much says what a few of us have been pointing out; it’s not shocking that emails were lost.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/missing-irs-emails-highlight-struggle-to-preserve-federal-records-1403311056
@ Jenos
Yes, yes, your two years of obsessive Benghazi commenting never happened. Just like your adoration of George Zimmermann never happened.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
On the other hand, if you’d ever worked for the federal government you would marvel at the morons who want to treat a federal agency as if it were a single hive-mind under the Svengali-like control of the White House. It doesn’t work that way. The odds of senior leadership (or even mid-level managers) in any executive branch agency being able to get away with something like that are exactly zero. They would be ratted out by outraged minions in the blink of an eye.
Federal employees are often loyal to the mission, but as a group they are not particularly loyal to the Administration, whichever it might be. They span the range of politics from outright communists to outright fascists, and they know way too much about how the sausage is made to have any starry-eyed deference to politicos of any stripe. They think of their ultimate bosses, the political appointees, as “the temps”. It is inconceivable that the kind of Oliver Stone fantasy that Issa and Camp are selling could actually happen. Too many people outside the Gang of However Many would have to know about it, and those people would squawk.
Will I believe rampant incompetence? Absolutely. Multi-year clairvoyant conspiracy, with no defectors? No chance.
According to the Wall Street Journal, House Ways & Means Chairman sent the first letter about targeting groups to the IRS in June 2011. About ten days later, Lerner’s computer had its horrific crash that not only took out her e-mails, but those of 6 other people involved in the mess.
The IRS also notified Congress about the crash last Friday… but told the White House about it back in April
What was the line from Alice in Wonderland about believing six impossible things before breakfast?
@DrDaveT: Now, now, Doc. You’re jumping to conclusions. This investigation has already proven quite valuable — how many people outside the IRS knew before now that the IRS had been violating federal records-keeping laws for years? Let’s not indulge in a hasty rush to judgment here…
@Jenos Idanian #13:
I guess you hadn’t read the Taxpayer Inspector General report (authored by Republican GWB-appointee and general IRS nemesis J. Russell George) that concluded Lerner first learned of that letter at a meeting on June 20, after her hard drive had already failed?
@DrDaveT: So, an e-mail from a member of Congress is sent to the IRS, and takes ten days to find its way to the person best positioned to address it? And that happens JUST AFTER her hard drive, which is the only place where so many e-mails that would be exceptionally relevant to that Congressional inquiry, crashes?
And oh, it turns out that the data-archiving service, Sonasoft, since 2009. Sonasoft likes to boast about their contract with the IRS when it offers potential clients their e-mail archiving service.
You really, really have to be incredibly gullible to believe the astonishing string of coincidences that are the IRS’ story here…
In light of the evidence in total, Its not bad retention policy, Doug… it’s the protect Big Government types at all cost.policy.
@DrDaveT:
Heh heh. I can corroborate this. I learned two weeks ago that my Communist cousin works for the state government while harping about revolution. Believe me, bureaucrats don’t like politicians any more than we do.
@Jenos Idanian #13: Man, it’s a good thing you’re not conspiracy-minded then, or you’d come off as a loon.
@ Florack
Yes, it’s nothing like the private sector, where senior executives are always held accountable. Just look at the terrible price WAMU CEO Kerry Killinger paid for his role in the real estate/banking collapse a number of years back.
@Tillman: Man, itâs a good thing youâre not conspiracy-minded then, or youâd come off as a loon.
And now even more fun comes out. The IRS had an annual contract with Sonasoft in 2005, and renewed it every year — until they canceled it in September 2011, just a couple months after Lerner’s hard drive crash. And Nikole Flax’s own laptop hard drive crashed in December 2011, conveniently wiping out her e-mails, too.
FYI, Flax was the chief of staff to Lerner’s immediate boss, and a frequent White House visitor.
It’s like they’re trying to look as suspicious as possible here…
@Jenos Idanian #13: I take it you’ve never had a computer crash, have always backed up all your data on drives that never fail, and are absolutely certain that everyone in the private sector does the same thing?
Man, do YOU have a lot to learn….
@grumpy realist: Oh, hell, yeah, that’s happened to me. It sucks, and that’s why I have a 3TB networked drive that backs up my system once a week.
But there’s no federal law that requires me to make damned sure it never happens.
I don’t have a contract with a company like Sonasoft to back up my data.
You’ve shown your contempt for me on several occasions. Is there any particular reason you’re trying to apply the same standards to me and the IRS?