Opinion

The IRS ‘Smidgen’

The dog ate my homework.

Those aren’t the exact words the IRS used to tell Congress it’s lost two years’ worth of Lois Lerner’s e-mails. But that’s the gist of the message.

Congress has been seeking Lerner’s e-mails as part of its investigation into why conservative organizations were singled out by the IRS for special tax scrutiny. Lerner was head of the tax-exempt division at the time, but has refused to testify about what happened under her watch.

Although the IRS can provide her internal e-mails, it says all Lerner’s e-mails to and from people outside the IRS from January 2009 to April 2011 have been wiped out because of a computer crash.

Problem is, that’s during the heart of the targeting, and the e-mails are critical to determining whether Lerner acted alone or with others.

Michigan Republican Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, rightly noted that informing Congress of this crash a year into the investigation “calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response.”

He was being charitable.

At a March hearing before another committee, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen smugly asserted it would take “years” to come up with the Lerner e-mails. Within 24 hours of Lerner’s being held in contempt, the IRS changed its tune and said Congress would get what it wanted.

Now the IRS says that after having “250 IRS employee working more than 120,000 hours at a cost of almost $10 million,” it has just discovered Lerner’s computer had crashed.

Remember how President Obama said Congress had not turned up a “smidgen of corruption” at the IRS? Sounds like we’ve found it.