USANews版 - Emails Point to IRS Officials Using Instant Messages |
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Lawmakers investigating the Internal Revenue Service’s treatment of
conservative groups released new emails Wednesday suggesting that top IRS
officials communicated through an instant-messaging system that wasn’t
routinely archived.
The revelation adds to lawmakers’ concerns about the agency’s handling of
documents related to their inquiry into the IRS’s alleged targeting of
conservative tea-party groups for burdensome scrutiny as they sought tax-
exempt status.
Republicans already have criticized the IRS for losing about two years’
worth of emails that could be important to the probe, largely because a
computer hard drive belonging to a former top IRS official, Lois Lerner,
crashed in mid-2011. Backup tapes storing the messages were routinely reused
after six months.
The latest emails suggest that IRS officials used a separate instant-
messaging system whose contents also weren’t preserved.
The emails raised new questions for some lawmakers about Ms. Lerner, the now
-retired head of the IRS tax-exempt-organizations division who has become a
focus of the inquiry.She wrote the emails to an IRS information technology
official and the head of her division’s audit unit.
“I was cautioning folks about email and how we have had several occasions
where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search
for responsive emails—so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails
,” Ms. Lerner wrote. “Someone asked if [instant messaging] conversations
were also searchable—I don’t know, but told them I would get back to them.
Do you know?” |
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