Saturday, January 23, 2016

The Dog Ate the IRS' Homework Again

Courtesy of Wombat-socho's "In The Mailbox, 01.22.16" news that the IRS is still playing fast and loose with evidence, this time in Congressional investigation into the IRS hiring outside lawyers to carry out an investigation and suit of Microsoft: More IRS IT Data “Issues”
Some time ago, the IRS entered into a questionable $2.2 million contract with a law firm. The law firm was to assist with IRS audit activities – but had little experience in handling IRS audit data, and was very expensive ($1000/hour billing rate).

The contract was bad enough to draw Congressional interest – and could well have been both unnecessary and contrary to Federal law, which appears to restrict performance of IRS audit functions to government employees.

The matter apparently became the subject of some form of litigation or investigation. As a result, a Federal judge ordered the IRS to preserve the hard drive used on the personal PC of the IRS’s former director of transfer pricing operations at the IRS Large Business and International Division– and individual named Samuel Maruca. Mr. Maruca (or one of his subordinates) apparently oversaw or influenced the contract in question.

Do I really need to tell you what happened?

Yeah, you guessed it. Contrary to the judge’s order, the IRS wiped the drive – last April, well after the judge had ordered it preserved.

To me, it seems this means either the IRS’s IT folks are spectacularly incompetent – or someone is deliberately trying to hide something. I can’t see any other plausible explanation for a drive ordered preserved by a Federal judge being wiped after it had been ordered preserved.

But maybe that’s just me. Feel free to draw your own conclusions regarding why the IRS did this.
One would think that after the Lerner debacle, the IRS and it's head honcho Koskinen would be more careful to preserve the evidence in a Congressional investigation.

On second thought, you really wouldn't because they have not faced any serious consequences from the last time.

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