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After Non-Profit Application Furor, IRS Says It's Lost 2 Years Of Lerner's Email
As reported by the Associated Press, via US News & World Report, the IRS says that it cannot locate much of the email sent by a former IRS official over a two-year period. "The IRS told Congress Friday it cannot locate many of Lois Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed during the summer of that year. Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by tea party and other conservative groups." Three congressional committees are investigating the agency because of the allegations of politically motivated mishandling of those applications, as is the Justice Department and the IRS's own inspector general. As the story says, "Congressional investigators have shown that IRS officials in Washington were closely involved in the handling of tea party applications, many of which languished for more than a year without action. But so far, they have not publicly produced evidence that anyone outside the agency directed the targeting or even knew about it." CBS News has a slightly different version, also based on the AP's reporting.
As soon as the Obama administration lives up to their promise of being the most transparent administration in the history of the ministry of truth
I'd love to see what she would say to a taxpayer "losing" 2 years of receipts during an audit.
I think that "my bad" wouldn't be enough.
The messiah of transparency fails yet again. In the private sector, incompetency like this would be a career-killer. In government, though, it's business as usual.
Oh her computer crashed did it? Did you try looking on the server where you keep the mail, and not on her computer?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The IRS told Congress Friday it cannot locate many of Lois Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed during the summer of that year.
Wow! I didn't know the IRS had personal email servers on every individuals personal computer, where all copies of a persons email sent and retrieved is kept and deleted from everywhere else.
The rest of us just use shared central email servers where multiple copies of everyone's email is kept, backed up daily. Boy, are we out of touch with reality!
Incorrect. This is how they promote people.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
Everybody should be depressed and angry but they are complacent. New chief executive, same ole shit. Corruption and lies.
Seriously, I have a feeling they set up local email accounts, thought archiving was too difficult or expensive to implement, and called it a day - 20 years ago.
And for the record, targeting political organizations wasn't isolated to conservative groups, and the only application rejected was for a progressive organization.
BOOP!
Yes,
Just like you can say that there has never been a oil pipeline that has been rejected either. By not quickly approving simple applications and letting them linger for years - you effectively reject the application, without the political backlash of having to actually do it. I would assume it was a simple progressive organization that didn't qualify for the tax break - it was quickly rejected so they can fix their problem, or get back to doing what they should be doing.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
I spec'ed, installed and managed mail servers for several organizations and this never happened on my watch. We had this magical power called "backups" that insulated us from user ineptitude and malfeasance. Another item is the "ten million dollars" to retrieve emails and documents. I was asked to provide several years of emails and documents involving eleven employees and specific criteria for a lawsuit. Legal had it in their hands within two days and that involved pulling and selectively restoring the identified tapes and burning to DVD. I call bullshit.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
Were those her emails to herself? Otherwise, they went through servers. This isn't a school board email server.... it's the IRS. Does anyone seriously think they don't have copious records of all the documents? My dog ate my homework? If you are gonna post any kind of credible reply to this, don't be an AC. Any AC reply to this will be assume to be coming from the legal staff of the Criminal Democratic Party.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
The NSA are professional liars. They've been caught lying about a huge number of things: spying on friendly foreign leaders, mass phone surveillance on everyone in the USA, modifying routers before they are shipped overseas, etc.
Double standard much? Who is more likely to be lying: the NSA or the IRS? Everyone in Washington are going after the IRS. Committees are meeting, IRA officials are testifying under oath, criminal investigations have been started. Higher ups at the IRA are going to be forced out, and there will be criminal charges. The same thing is also going to occur with the Veteran's Administration scandal.
Meanwhile over at the NSA, the sound of crickets. They claim that their own secret investigations have found they did everything right. Somehow this seems good enough. No one has been called to task. Even the people responsible for letting Snowden get access to all that information seem to be off the hook.
As bad as the IRS and VA situations are, they pale in comparison to the NSA situation and yet nothing has happened as a result. It's business as usual. The NSA is completely unaccountable to anybody for anything, and when they do screw up nothing happens to any insiders. This is guaranteed to result in a culture of incompetence. We are in big trouble.
Why is Snark Required?
Bullshit, its all irrelevant to the issue at hand. The irs specifically targeted groups they didnt like and asked them to jump through hoops.which were highly illegal. For example you cant ask them for their member list, or if they are religious, all things asked. If they did the same thing to socialsts communists black panthers gay groups women groups or the kkk, id still feel the same, this shouldnt be partisain, unless you beleive it was ok and that makes it ok when the other side has the whitehouse...remember that
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Two years of emails?!? Nixon only lost 18 1/2 minutes of the Watergate Tapes and he had to resign.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
There seems to be a cabal of people who will spend all their mod points modding everything on your posting history down if they find you posted something they find particularly offensive. This causes a lot of people to post controversial stufff as AC.
There are also groups of people like groupies who follow topics in order to impress a particular viewpoint that seems to match their worldview. Both seem to be problems on Slashdot in the last couple of years.
You will find that with the retaliation that seems to be going on in today's environment, people just don't want their online persona associated with something controversial. There is the mass down modding to ruin your karma and restrict your posting abilities but also take Mozilla for instance. They canned a new CEO (who had been working for them in other offices since their inception) for something he did 8 years ago that had the majority support of his community at the time. What will you be driven away from or refused or jailed or whatever retaliation that happens in 8 years over a comment you made today or yesterday?
Actually they did the same thing to socialist etc. groups. In fact the only group that was actually denied a tax exemption was a progressive church.
But don't let facts bother you.
Amazing how ineffective these intelligence agencies are when the issue in question goes against the absolute power agenda...
I would settle for this Administration following the rule of law.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
plainly opposite in many cases if they are trying to stop social improvements like immigration reform
This is a subjective statement. One person may consider a particular immigration reform position as representing social improvement, while another may view the position as damaging to the same society.
Write failed: Broken pipe
No, in reality the IRS investigated all groups with political parties and movements in their names, since they're required by law (i.e. Congress) to only allow non-political groups to be granted tax exempt status. And the IRS investigated (and rejected) far more liberal groups than conservative groups. So (1) they were required to investigate political groups, so the investigation was not only proper, it was required by law passed by Congress, and (2) they didn't target Tea Party groups exclusively or even disproportionately.
So what were you complaining about?
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
First they lied to the congress
Then the US Marshals seizing police Stingray records to keep them out of the ACLU
Now IRS is lying about a certain computer crash in justifying their refusal of disclosing tghe email records of a key IRS employee who was in charge of harassing groups which were affiliated with the so-called "TEA party"
The Obama administration simply does *NOT* respect the rule of law anymore !
if you think any but a handful of emails that aren't sent to or from the a White House are required by the FRA to be archived
Having read the statute, prior to hitting my crack pipe, I see no such "White House" criteria.
You may read the latest revision of the IRS interpretation of the statute here, where you will learn that e-mail — all e-mail — that meets that statutory definition of a "record" must be preserved within either an "electronic recordkeeping system," as defined by the IRS manual and well beyond Lois's broken computer, or "must be printed out and placed in the appropriate record system." Any e-mail communication Lois made regarding the disposition of some non-profit's status would obviously have qualified as a "record" under the plain language of 1.15.6-1.
And yes, we do prosecute people for destruction of government records. Probably not the protected political appointee hatchet-people of the powers-that-be, but it does happen, because it's criminal.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I would settle for any administration to follow the law. But yes, it would be nice to start with the present one, and work our way forward. And a good message would be sent by also indicting the surviving criminals from past ones. Alas, it is but a fantasy of mine.
Just a note about this IRS "scandal", The only group that was actually denied was a "liberal" group, the Maine chapter of Emerge America, which trains Democratic women to run for office. So boo on anyone that is trying to keep the story alive.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Maybe it has something to do with the IRS not being in the White House, and not using the White House's email system.
Or maybe it has something to do with the article itself saying that the White House's email system archives everything, and has been in place "since Obama took office", which most people would suppose means 2009, not a year after the 2010 article discussing the system in the past tense.
See that "Preview" button?
Not quite.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I work for a Fortune 500. They have strict archive and retention policies, automatically enforced at the email server. The Federal government also has archive and retention policies. The IRS, in particular, expects taxpayers to keep records FOREVER (or until you die and your will is probated). I don't need to come up with "cockamamy scenarios" to say that the IRS losing email is sort of stupid. Yes, that was two years ago; but did she lose the email of everything she was working on AT THE TIME? That would be a complete mess for any work in progress, and somehow I would imagine that the IT department tries to avoid it.
Actually they did the same thing to socialist etc. groups. In fact the only group that was actually denied a tax exemption was a progressive church.
But don't let facts bother you.
BULLSHIT
The Internal Revenue Service on Friday apologized for targeting groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, confirming long-standing accusations by some conservatives that their applications for tax-exempt status were being improperly delayed and scrutinized.
Lois G. Lerner, the IRS official who oversees tax-exempt groups, said the “absolutely inappropriate” actions by “front-line people” were not driven by partisan motives.
Umm, yeah, the IRS didn't target them. That's why they apologized. And no, it wasn't for political purposes. That must be the IRS can't find her emails....
What was that about facts bothering you?
The real question that should be asked is why are political think tanks granted charity status in the first place? They are often simply a front for monied self interest, pushing self interest through political propaganda is what they are all about. Regardless of whether I agree of disagree with their propaganda, I don't see why they should get a tax break just for disseminating it?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
His failure was attempting to negotiate with the far right nutjobs when he had the numbers and the mandate to put the boot in and do what he was elected to do. In his defense, he pissed away his political capital dealing with a real financial black hole, not an imaginary one like we currently have here in Australia.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Not merely the majority of investigations and delays were targeted against politically conservative groups, but the nature of the investigations, is an issue.
If you think some progressive, liberal, or activist groups were also discriminated against, give Issa's office a call. He's probably happy to investigate even more accusations.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
>The IRS, in particular, expects taxpayers to keep records FOREVER (or until you die and your will is probated) What? Where are you getting this nonsense? The IRS does not expect you to keep records for your *entire life*. That's absolute moronic drivel. In fact, the IRS doesn't require you to do *anything*; it's congress that writes the tax code. Not just a different entity, a completely different branch of government. The IRS isn't some extra-legal entity that makes up their own rules to inflict on citizens and delights in making them difficult.
There are approximately 2600 pages of tax law. That generated over 70,000 pages of tax regulations - which the IRS essentially wrote themselves and enforce. To a large extent, they did make up their own rules.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The only group that was actually denied was a "liberal" group, the Maine chapter of Emerge America, which trains Democratic women to run for office. So boo on anyone that is trying to keep the story alive.
They were "denied" after they were first approved. Meanwhile the enemies of the current administration were neither denied nor approved, a fate worse than either.
"His name was James Damore."
Insofar as corporations serve their stockholders, employees, and customers, who are real people, they may claim a right to speech on any number of issues that impact them or their constituents.
We can probably re-write the law to survive constitutional review, but neither major party actually wants that unless one gains an advantage over the other.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I'd love to see what she would say to a taxpayer "losing" 2 years of receipts during an audit.
Its better than that. Imagine if you only lost the receipts that were of interest to the IRS, that you still have many receipts that they are not interested in.
From the article:
"Camp's office said the missing emails are mainly ones to and from people outside the IRS, "such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.""
Can we just have a flat tax (that phases in at the poverty line, not literally flat) and no deductions? Then the IRS can be scaled down to a small fraction of its current size and have very little power, no deduction no power to interpret things. As an added bonus it removes a major source of political corruption, the creating of those deductions for influential constituents.
I would settle for this Administration following the rule of law.
Ha! Laws are for peasants, not their rulers.
There's this principle, as part of the RICO act, that says creating a lot of shell corporations, where money moves around between companies in a very complicated way and it's very hard to track it, is one of the signs of an organized crime operation. Parts of the RICO law are written to deal with this specific method. For ciriminals to use this method, they have to build enough shell corps to make tracking the money very hard - a few won't do it, twenty or 50 or 119 is better. The Idea is that the more levels of shells there are, the more time the organization has to delay a criminal investigation, as the investigators have to keep going back to a judge and getting more warrents for new records. If they don't find anything the first few times, the judge is likely to stop giving them more warrents, plus there's more time to move money into places such as offshore accounts, or for the top dogs to skip the country if they must.
There weren't a whole bunch of new PACs and such made by the Democrats in that election cycle, but because of the very nature of the Tea Party movement, we saw a lot of Tea party this and Tea Party that, over a hundred new non-profits for states, groups of states, and particular parts of the movement. In many cases, some of the Tea party organizers put their names on multiple applications in different positions, which is another sign of potential shell corporations. That's another possible red flag under RICO, seeing the same person's name for different positions in different corporations which are being formed in multiple states, as is seeing organizations incorporated in odd states (i.e.a company doing businesss only in Arkansas, but incorporating in Florida). (Delaware is somewhat of an exception to this, as their laws make it popular for many businesses to incorporate there, but I don't think there are any real advantages to incorporating in Delaware for non-profits).
The IRS has also long had a position that even if something is technically legal to do as the law is written, it can still be illlegal if the primary purpose of doing it appears to be not to achieve whatever goal the law endorses, but to evade taxes. That means they could have approached this as a case where some of these new organizations might not qualify as their particular type of non-profit, AND might have made a profit AND had the intent to avoid paying the taxes that would entail. Technically, if somebody screws up and didn't stay within the non-profit rules, the IRS next looks to see if they made money, and if they did, for the third step the IRS gets to assume that the mistake in claiming non-profit status isn't an innocent mistake, but a deliberate way to evade taxes on that money. If you think about it, this makes a certain amount of sense - as the plaintiff at that point is often arguing that they accidentally made a profit without trying to, and they just coincidentally filed as a non-profit by innocent mistake. The press has tended to treat this as though the new non-profits could be set up wrong quite innocently, and have made a profit under law, but not done anything really wrong unless the IRS could prove some sort of intent, but the law normally assumes people don't make profits accidentally, and don't just happen to get the paperwork wrong coincidentally.
Who is John Cabal?
Or you can just rig the system, like Obama's advisers do, apparently.
All the President’s Muses: Obama and Prosecutorial Misconduct
The only group that was actually denied was a "liberal" group
The whole point of the scandal (about which you are clearly uninformed, or about which you are being deliberately disingenuous and deceptive) is that the IRS put applying conservative groups through the ringer specifically to delay their activities through then-upcoming election cycle. They dragged out conservative-sounding applications for months or years through an intimidating, recurring process of illegally asking for information like personal information about group members' lifestyles, the books they read, their personal religious musings, and other complete BS. It wasn't about approving or denying the groups' non-profit status, it was about keeping them in limbo while more quickly approving groups that were more likely to back the administration before the election.
You really think the word scandal needs quotes around it, because none of that was real or mattered? Or are you dismissive of that illegal treatment because you, like the administration, just don't happen to like the thinking of the fellow citizens that were abused in that way?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
He'll, I'd settle for the IRS following its own rule that are enforced so strictly on the rest of us, which is that the taxpayer is presumed guilty. If you, as the accused, cannot produce records proving your case, you lose and get reamed. So in this instance, since the IRS claimed to have 'lost' the records that would have proved its case, we will make the same assumption the IRS does.
It didn't matter, and it doesn't matter. Republicans and democrats will continue to rule for the foreseeable future despite all their "scandals". Personally, I don't vote for either, but I still have to live with the results. The IRS has always been used as a weapon. That's what it is designed for. I find their treatment of regular individuals much more scandalous. This 501 thing is bullshit anyway. As far as I'm concerned, political campaign financing is nothing but money laundering, and the 501 status is legitimized tax evasion. So I have no sympathy for these people seeking it, "conservative" or "liberal". I put them in quotes because those labels are also bullshit. Let's not pretend that harassment of one's political enemies is anything new. It's only now with the demographic threat showing its face that people are starting to whine about it. Crocodile tears, welcome to life in the big city.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
None of the above, I'm one of those people who has gotten burned because I didn't keep the purchase records for something 25 years earlier, and when I sold it and had to declare a profit, I spent many hours trying to find proof of the cost basis. Perhaps you have not yet bought (or inherited) real property, assets of declarable and insurable value, or stock, and thus have not yet encountered these issues (no, wait, if you're younger you may have bought stock in the no-certificate book-entry-only broker-keeps-records era rather than the old transferable-piece-of-paper era, which makes life a lot easier - until your broker goes under). Rather than insult you back, I will urge you to research the record-keeping requirements before the IRS expects you to pay tax on ordinary income for the ENTIRE sale price of something because, without proof of original investment cost, they peg it at zero.
Each email system had a triplicate of backups done so they would not lose emails. They used Microsoft Exchange Server and digital tape backups. They used Outlook and backed up PST files to network drives.
If they lost her emails with a system like that it was no accident.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Do you really want people like Government bureaucrat deciding what is charitable and what isn't? It's been a long time since i've felt that Most chareties were more the Moral Narcisism at best and "a front for monied self interest, pushing self interest through political propaganda" at worst, but I can't imagine how having a bureaucrat deciding which plutocrat gets a tax break makes anything better.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
What I take personally is the constant, unending, pig-headed suggestion that because I hate (and I mean hate) Obama, I wasn't complaining about Bush when he did similar things.
I was.
And I actually voted for Obama, once.
But the constant parade of water-brained team players who come out to claim 'BUT THE OTHER GUY" every time another one of Obama's constitution-shredding sprees comes to light destroys productive conversation and helps ensure that nothing is done about the problem.
And I'm fucking sick and tired of it.
When it comes to non-profits and raising money, not being approved is synonymous with not being denied.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.