U.S. Reps. Kevin Brady (R-TX), Vern Buchanan (R-FL) and U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) led a congressional call on Tuesday for a briefing from the IRS about what is being done to correct what was found to be deficient procedures for archiving and producing electronic documents.
In a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, the lawmakers noted that the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee requested a review of IRS recordkeeping practices last year after revelations that the IRS had “sanitized” the hard drive of an employee’s computer, destroying records that were part of ongoing litigation.
Brady, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Buchanan, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight, and Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, also voiced concerns about the IRS’s destruction of 422 backup takes and 24,000 emails requested by the committees as part of a congressional investigation of IRS treatment of tax-exempt entities.
“The lack of an electronic mail system that is compliant with federal records management requirements and could allow the IRS to retain and search the records of current and separated employees is unacceptable,” the letter states. “Failure to retain and produce records reduces transparency, inhibits congressional oversight, and opens the IRS to judicial sanctions during litigation.”
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) recently released a report that concluded that the IRS’s email system failed to meet federal record retention requirements.
“TIGTA’s findings are also symptomatic of the IRS’s shambolic information technology modernization efforts,” the letter continues. “The production of IRS emails as part of external records requests currently relies on the continued integrity and retrievability of thousands of individual employees’ hard drives; or, alternatively, relies on IRS employees to print and file important e-mails. Neither system is sustainable, reliable, or scalable to satisfy the voluminous document productions that are required of the IRS.”
The letter concludes by requesting a briefing by the end of September on a solution to IRS issues with retention and production of electronic records.