IRS “hard drive crashes continue as we speak”–Really?!

There are plenty of reasons to dislike the IRS. First, and most obviously, it’s the agency directly responsible for taking our money in an incredibly complicated and annoying manner. With 75,000 pages of tax code, helping the government take a cut of our income is a nerve-wracking process for even the most obedient taxpayer. And they know it, too—IRS chief John Koskinen has outright admitted that filing taxes in America is far too complex.

It’s no surprise that these tax collectors aren’t careful with our money either. This is the agency that handed out $2.8 million in bonuses to delinquent employees and some $70 million in bonuses when it was supposed to be tightening its belt. This is also the agency that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on travel for execs and wasted money on everything from Nerf footballs to Star Trek parody videos.

Of course, for many people, distaste for the IRS kicked into high gear with the news that the agency hassled conservative/tea party and even progressive political groups with unfair delays and scrutiny. The government can’t handle criticism, it seems, and the IRS decided to make life miserable for any organization that didn’t adequately bow before the system.

At the center of this scandal is Lois Lerner, the high-ranking IRS agent who repeatedly refused to testify about her role in this corruption by pleading the Fifth. Because of her silence (only recently broken with protestations of innocence), an archive of tens of thousands of her emails is the one clear source of evidence to determine wrongdoing in the political targeting debacle.

So, inevitably since this is the government we’re talking about, many of those emails are missing.

For months now, we’ve heard excuse after excuse and story after story about these elusive emails. Back in June, the IRS claimed that the emails were gone because of limited email storage space and a computer crash back in 2011.

Since then, new revelations and accusations have been all over the map. In one statement, the IRS suggested that the emails are not missing after all, but it would be a lot of work to find them. Reports have surfaced that the emails could have been saved on a government-wide backup service, but the IRS says no such service exists. Meanwhile, the agency continues to announce the loss of more and more emails in what can only be described as highly convenient circumstances for corrupt IRS employees.

Oh, and did I mention that a Department of Justice attorney who has represented the IRS was apparently himself involved in the original corruption?

I must admit I haven’t paid a lot of attention to the IRS scandal until recently. I tend to be more interested in foreign policy and civil liberties issues, and it’s not like my feelings about the IRS could get much more negative anyway, amirite?

But then I saw this headline: Koskinen: “Hard Drive Crashes Continue as We Speak”

I mean, really? Really?!

http://media.tumblr.com/e0e6e645f77cd2281673c5f281ba2dd3/tumblr_inline_mw5pnd9qcv1rv04lt.gif

(If you want to watch IRS head Koskinen make that claim in context, skip to around the 1:25:00 mark of his full testimony here—but watching most or all of it is pretty enlightening.)

Right now, there are just hard drives crashing right and left in the IRS building. Really? The IT guys are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, getting messages on what I can only presume are c. 1995 beepers that yet another drive is down. Really?!

I joke, but the claims about crashed hard drives have already passed the range of plausibility. Based on the tax forms they’ve created, the IRS obviously doesn’t have a very positive view of the American public. But this is just too much to swallow. As funnier people than I have asked, what are the chances?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KohtsEmWY2w&w=560&h=315]

Now, Koskinen may be speaking more generally when he says hard drive crashes “continue as we speak;” in any organization the size of the IRS, hard drives will crash sometimes. And, to be fair, he was not running (or even working for) the IRS at the time when the targeting of political groups occurred.

But the overarching story is simply not convincing—and I struggle to believe that this “hard drives just crash all the time” narrative won’t pave the way for more deception and obfuscation. If the IRS gets away with this line of defense, I’m confident we’ll see complications of technology becoming an ever more popular excuse on Capitol Hill.

As my mother likes to quote, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” The IRS’ web is about as tangled as it gets, and their “The computer’s broken so my hands are tied!” mantra sets a very dangerous precedent for government accountability.