First Lois Lerner’s home computer crashed. Then it was seven IRS employees, many who had important positions. You can read about them here. Now, according to the Daily Caller, the IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel Thomas Kane reported in congressional testimony that even more IRS officials succumbed to computer crashes. He estimated that the number was no more than 20. Kane also stated that the IRS does not know yet if those lost emails are backed up anywhere.
Last month in June, the IRS commissioner John Koskinen testified that he did not know of any way to get missing IRS emails back, which was in contrast to his March testimony that IRS employee emails are saved on servers. In that interim time between the two testimonies, it was learned that in September of 2011, the IRS canceled its contract with an email archiving firm after 6 years.
The names of the newest IRS crash victims include: “David Fish, who routinely corresponded with Lois Lerner, as well as Lerner subordinate Andy Megosh, Lerner’s technical adviser Justin Lowe, and Cincinnati-based agent Kimberly Kitchens”.
The IRS computer crashes happened in both Washington DC and Cincinnati. Additionally, it appears that the IRS violated the The Federal Records Act, which required IRS employees to save and also print out all of their emails related to IRS business — in the unlucky event a hard drive crashed or was deleted in an improper data recycling procedure.
UPDATE: Even as the IRS scandal continues to worsen, the IRS brazenly put out a new solicitation on Monday for “media destruction” services to destroy at least another 3,200 hard drives.
You can’t make this up.