An IRS Computer Glitch Gives New Life to a Fading Scandal

摘要

If a friendly auditor from the Internal Revenue Service comes calling and you can't get your hands on all those receipts you're supposed to keep for seven years, try this: tell them you saved electronic copies on your computer's hard drive, but it crashed. That, after all, is the excuse the IRS gave this month to congressional investigators who suspect the agency of politically motivated scrutiny of right-wing nonprofits. A year ago, House Republicans asked the IRS for emails from early 2009 to mid-2013 by the head of its office of exempt organizations, Lois Lerner. After producing tens of thousands of emails over the past year, the IRS admitted on June 13 that an unknown number were unrecoverable because Lerner's hard drive crashed in June 2011, supposedly vaporizing messages she had sent to people outside the IRS from January 2009 to April 2011.