Taxable Talk

Let’s assume you’re under a court order to find some emails. Your hard drive crashed, but you think that some of them are saved on your Blackberry. Would you:
(a) Try to find them on the Blackberry,
(b) Do nothing, or
(c) Erase the Blackberry.

If you’re the IRS, the answer is (c). After the IRS was on notice about the missing Lois Lerner emails the IRS then wiped clean Ms. Lerner’s Blackberry. The Washington Post notes,

In response to the judge’s order, a top IRS official said in a signed declaration that the agency has no record of attempting to recover data from the mobile device.

IRS attorney Thomas J. Kane said in a separate declaration that the agency “removed or wiped clean” information from the Blackberry in June 2012, shortly after congressional staffers questioned Lerner about the targeting allegations and in the same month that the IRS inspector general began examining the issue.

Kane offered no explanation for why the IRS “removed or wiped clean” the data, and the IRS did not respond to the same question when asked by The Washington Post on Wednesday.

As Reason.com stated,

There may be a reasonable explanation for all this. But if there is, the IRS has yet to provide it, and in fact has refused when asked to do so. Combined with all the other suspicious and convenient omissions, lapses, and losses related to this case, it does make one wonder if perhaps there isn’t a reasonable explanation to be offered.

There’s nothing to add to Reason’s conclusion.

Tags: IRS.Scandal

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2014 at 6:58 pm and is filed under IRS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.