IRS likely erased hard drive of former agency official

IRS says it will fix ‘shortcomings’ that fail to archive employee emails

Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chastised IRS leaders Wednesday for the agency’s inability to preserve its employees’ emails and track those records down when needed. The IRS says it will have a system that complies with federal recordkeeping standards by December, but critics said the promised changes are years overdue.

The latest dustup over document retention surrounds a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit between Microsoft and the IRS.

Last month, the agency told a federal judge that it couldn’t comply with a court order to save emails from former IRS official Samuel Maruca because it had already tagged his computer’s hard drive for destruction shortly after he left the agency in 2014; the hard drive was likely erased later that year or early in 2015.

Although the IRS now says it can cobble together most of the relevant emails from other backup sources, GOP members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee who have held dozens of IRS hearings dating back to 2013 said record destruction was an “ongoing problem” that validated their calls to impeach Commissioner John Koskinen.

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