Brady, Roskam, Hatch request briefing on IRS electronic records system

Congressional leaders recently requested a briefing from the IRS following a report detailing the agency’s failure to preserve and provide electronic records in response to litigation and congressional inquires.

In a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, U.S. Reps. Kevin Brady (R-TX), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and Peter Roskam (R-IL), the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee’s Oversight Subcommittee, and U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, requested a briefing no later than Nov. 2.

The request follows a recent report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) that found the IRS failed to implement a modernized email system and wasted $12 million on subscriptions to a new email system that it never used.

“Moreover, TIGTA found that the IRS may have violated its own contracting procedures and federal contracting law requirements because it failed to conduct a full and open competition for the contract,” the lawmakers wrote. “We write to request the IRS chief information officer brief the committees on these inexcusable failures.”

In 2012, the Office of Management and Budget issued a directive that federal agencies “manage all email records in an electronic format” that “supports records management and litigation requirements … including the capability to identify, retrieve and retain the records for as long as they are needed.”

The IRS elected to upgrade its existing software rather than deploy a new one. The agency did not open the contract to competition as required by the Internal Revenue Manual, the letter states.

The lawmakers also raised questions about the IRS breaking federal appropriations law by spending $12 million on subscriptions to a new email system that was unusable because it did not meet security requirements.

“An annual appropriation generally may only be used to meet a bona fide need arising in the fiscal year for which the money was appropriated,” the letter states. “TIGTA found that the IRS ‘may have violated the bona fide needs rule when it purchased the subscriptions in fiscal years 2014 and 2015 by using fiscal years 2014 and 2015 appropriations and not deploying the software subscriptions in those years.’”

The lawmakers concluded by requesting a congressional briefing by IRS Chief Information Officer Gina Garza no later than Nov. 2.