At this point, even liberals have to admit that this stinks like a 5 day old fish
(Fox News) The IRS said Friday that it has lost emails from five other employees involved in congressional probes into the agency’s targeting of conservative groups, leading one top Republican to declare “this pattern must stop.”
The announcement comes after the agency said in June that it could not locate an untold number of emails to and from Lois Lerner, who headed the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. The revelation set off a new round of investigations and congressional hearings.
On Friday, the IRS issued a report to Congress saying the agency also lost emails from five other employees related to the probe, including two agents who worked in a Cincinnati office processing applications for tax-exempt status.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, whose committee has been investigating the scandal, said the disclosure is yet another example of the Obama administration changing its story on the scandal.
“The IRS’s ever-changing story is practically impossible to follow at this point, as they modify it each time to accommodate new facts,” Issa, R-Calif., said. “This pattern must stop.”
This is a pattern of corruption. To believe this just happens homogeneously, one must be a total fool. Yet, the IRS has no problem going with this story because they fully understand that neither the majority of the news media nor the Obama administration nor elected Democrats will hold the IRS responsible.
In addition to the Cincinnati workers, they include a technical adviser to Lerner, a tax law specialist and a group manager in the tax-exempt division.
In general, the IRS said the workers archived emails on their computer hard drives when their email accounts became too full. When those computers crashed, the emails were lost.
This dovetails nicely with the IRS making backups on tape (seriously? Tape?) and deleting them after six months. Sarbanes-Oxley requires your company to keep email backups for 5 years. Section 802(a) states the punishment for knowingly altering, falsifying or destroying documents as ‘fined, imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or both.’ Remember Enron? They were a big driver of the law and data requirements. Yet, here we have a federal agency failing to comply with federal law. A federal agency that deems you guilty till you prove your innocence.
Crossed at Right Wing News.
