WASHINGTON—The Internal Revenue
Service said a former official's 2011 computer crash significantly hampered its
efforts to dig up correspondence requested as part of a congressional review of
the agency's treatment of conservative groups.
The IRS
said it is providing more emails to lawmakers and is doing its best to
reconstruct correspondence from the former executive, Lois Lerner, who retired
as the controversy unfolded last year. Its effort, which has included searching
email of other senders and recipients, resulted in an additional 24,000 emails
that are being provided to lawmakers, the agency said in a summary of its
actions.
House
Republicans investigating the IRS controversy reacted unhappily to the news of
Ms. Lerner's computer crash.
"The
fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is
completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the
IRS's response to congressional inquiries," House Ways and Means Committee
Chairman Dave Camp (R., Mich.) said. "There needs to be an immediate
investigation and forensic audit by the Justice Department as well as the
inspector general."
Mr.
Camp said the IRS couldn't provide Lerner emails to and from people outside the
agency, "conveniently" feeding the impression she "acted
alone." He called for an administration-wide search for her emails. House
Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) said,
"If there wasn't nefarious conduct that went much higher than Lois Lerner
in the IRS targeting scandal, why are they playing these games?"
Ms.
Lerner herself unsuccessfully tried to get agency technicians to reconstruct
her hard drive at the time it crashed, the IRS said.
Ms. Lerner is a former head of the agency's exempt-organizations
division. The House of Representatives recently voted to hold her in contempt of Congress after she
declined to testify at hearings and cited her Fifth Amendment privilege against
self-incrimination.
She has
said she did nothing wrong in connection with conservative tea-party groups'
applications for tax-exempt status. Many of the applications were subjected to
heightened scrutiny starting in 2010, at a time when nonprofit groups were
becoming more politically active in elections.
Congressional
Democrats have argued that some liberal groups eventually were caught up in the
IRS net as well.
In a
statement, the IRS said that it has made "unprecedented efforts" to
comply with congressional demands for documents and information concerning the
targeting. The effort has involved more than 250 IRS employees working more
than 120,000 hours at a cost of almost $10 million.
Counting
information already provided, "investigators have—or will soon have—a
total of 67,000 emails sent or received by Ms. Lerner," the IRS said.
The
agency added that it is working with Congress and "has remained focused on
being thorough and responding as quickly as possible to the wide-ranging
requests from Congress while taking steps to protect underlying taxpayer
information."
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for the original article in the Wall Street Journal.