The IRS Memory Hole The Agency Waited Two Months to tell Congress About Missing E-mails.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-irs-memory-hole-1403219814
So which IRS divisions are still functional, apart from those responsible for collecting tax dollars and targeting conservative groups? The IT department is supposedly to blame for more than two years of missing emails, and the congressional relations team seems to entertain delusions of competence, even as it misleads a sympathetic Senate committee. The list of, er, coincidences lengthens.
On Monday IRS Commissioner John Koskinen met with Finance Chairman Ron Wyden and ranking Republican Orrin Hatch to explain the apparent hard-drive meltdowns that erased the communications to the rest of the executive branch from Lois Lerner and six IRS colleagues. The bipartisan duo learned that the IRS discovered the gap late in February, though by then the investigation had been underway for nearly a year.
In early April the IRS relayed the information to the Treasury, and the Treasury informed the White House the same month. But for some reason Congress and the public were left out of this information daisy chain until last Friday. The IRS has no explanation for the two-month blackout period.
At the Monday meeting with Senate Finance, Mr. Koskinen also neglected to mention the detail of the six other IRS employees whose computers also crashed at the same time as Ms. Lerner’s, though he must have known. IRS staff didn’t tell Senate staff in a meeting the same day either. Mr. Hatch revealed in a letter Thursday that he found out about this in a press release from the HouseWays and Means Committee.
This turn of events is all the more remarkable because Messrs. Wyden and Hatch were about to close a Senate investigation that involved 700,000 pages of documents and 30 interviews. They had agreed on consensus findings of fact that were being drafted, but Mr. Hatch asked for Mr. Koskinen to formally attest that all relevant communications had been produced to Congress. Forcing the IRS chief to go on legal record may help explain why the email gap was finally disclosed after two months, instead of even later or never.
Mr. Koskinen’s lack of candor is either evidence of ineptitude or deliberate abuse, and the Senate committee has reopened its probe. To recover the emails, Congress will need to expand its inquiry beyond the IRS proper to the Treasury, Justice Department and even the White House.
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