Thinking Out Loud: The Dog Ate Lois Lerner’s Emails?

The Obama administration has again defied credulity with the news that all external emails sent by Lois Lerner during that critical period — years 2011- 2013 when the IRS was targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status — have disappeared because of a hard drive crash that wiped them all out. What’s more, the back-up files containing copies of the emails are also gone.

Leave aside the fact that this “The dog ate my emails” excuse, as it’s being called, beggars belief. Most companies — none of which have the IRS’s resources — keep back-up files of all email communications so they can’t be lost. As one web expert put it. “Countless times I retrieved essential files, including emails from off-site back-up tapes. Such retrievals were necessary due to file age or server crashes. These items were easily recovered, even decades later.”

Also leave aside the fact that after this scandal broke the IRS and Obama administration first told Congress no targeting of conservative and tea Party groups had occurred, but when that proved false they claimed it was a few rogue agents in a field office in Cincinnati. But then that claim also proved false so they claimed liberal and progressive groups were also targeted, which has also proved false.

Even leave aside, although talk about chutzpah, the fact that the IRS’s admission that the server holding Lois Lerner’s emails had crashed — which the IRs had known for months without telling Congress — was buried in the middle of a 27-page letter to Congress in which the IRS asked Congress to end its investigation of the IRS in this matter!

Instead, focus on the fact that the IRS is a government agency subject to federal record-preservation requirements, and the fact that, once this scandal broke, the IRS knew it would be asked to produce all records, including emails, in compliance with an investigation the IRS knew was coming.

To that end, granting that hard drives crash on occasion, let’s re-focus on the IRS’s lost back-up files. The IRS says that the critical back-up tapes from 2011 to 2013 no longer exist because they were recycled, which means the IRS must have recycled these emails approximately two years after they were stored. And yet, in case it needs to audit us, the IRS requires us taxpayers to maintain our tax records for at least three years.

With that in mind, ask yourself this.  If IRS agents ever audited you, how do you think those agents would respond if you told them you couldn’t produce emails and electronic documents related to your tax returns, even those that go back only a couple of years, because you recycled all of your backup files?