Congressman Paul Ryan engaged in a heated exchange with IRS commissioner John Koskinen at a hearing today over the tax agency’s claims that it permanently lost thousands of emails of Lois Lerner, the official at the center of the IRS targeting scandal.
“You are the Internal Revenue Service,” Ryan said. “You can reach into the lives of hard-working taxpayers and with a phone call, an e-mail or a letter you can turn their lives upside down. You ask taxpayers to hang onto seven years of their personal tax information in case they are ever audited and you can’t keep six months worth of employee e-mails? And now that we are seeing this investigation, you don’t have the e-mails, hard drives crashed. You learned about this months ago. You just told us, and we had to ask you on Monday.”
Koskinen disputed the claim that the committee had just learned of the hard-drive crash, but he later acknowledged upon further questioning from Chairman Dave Camp that the committee did just learn that the emails were not backed up on the server and therefore allegedly lost forever.
