Rep. Tom Reed (R-Corning)
WASHINGTON – Congressman Tom Reed (R-Corning) wants to get to the bottom of the recent Internal Revenue Service scandal that involves hundreds of missing emails.
During a hearing on the House’s Ways and Means Committee last week, Reed pressed IRS Commissioner John Koskinen on the agency’s most recent troubles over two years of alleged lost emails. The correspondences were to and from former director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division Lois Lerner. Reed pushed the Commissioner, asking why Lerner’s hard drive was sent to a forensic lab run by the IRS’s criminal investigations unit and where the report from that investigation currently stands.
During a conference call with reporters on Monday, Reed said he will continue to pressure the IRS on trying to determine what happened to the emails and whether or not they can be retrieved.
“To me, it just doesn’t make sense that you have the IRS – one of the largest agencies of the federal government – in a position where their explanation is, ‘Oh… we lost these emails. We kept them for six month and now they’re gone forever,'” Reed explained. “I’ve heard from IT experts from across the country and right in our district where they have commented anecdotally saying, and as many of us know, emails just don’t come up missing.”
In addition, Congressman Reed said an independent investigation should be conducted by a special prosecutor, rather than by investigators within the IRS.
In a recent letter to Congress, the IRS admitted that a computer crash was likely to blame in the loss of emails Lois Lerner, which were sent and received between January 2009 and April 2011. During his testimony in front of the Ways and Means Committee, Commissioner Koskinen said that typically if a hard drive is irretrievable, it is destroyed and that sending the hard drive to the criminal investigation unit was an “extraordinary step.”
The IRS has been under fire over the past year for targeting organizations based on political beliefs. In May of last year, the Treasury Inspector General for Taxpayer Administration (TIGTA) issued a report confirming that, “the IRS used inappropriate criteria to identify organizations applying for tax-exempt status.” According to the report, the abuse of power began as far back as 2010.
Leave a Reply