House Panels Looking Into I.R.S.’s Claims of Lost Emails I.R.S. Says Lois Lerner Emails Were Destroyed in Computer Crash

House Panels Looking Into I.R.S.’s Claims of Lost Emails

I.R.S. Says Lois Lerner Emails Were Destroyed in Computer Crash

WASHINGTON — Two House committees investigating the Internal Revenue Service are looking into whether the agency’s claim that it lost emails of interest to investigators amounted to obstruction and a violation of federal record-keeping rules, congressional aides said on Monday.

The I.R.S. late on Friday told investigators looking into accusations of politically motivated misconduct by the agency that two years’ worth of emails sent and received by Lois Lerner, the official at the center of the inquiry, had been destroyed because of a computer crash in mid-2011.

The disclosure, included in an I.R.S. filing to the Senate Finance Committee, added to suspicions among Republican lawmakers that the I.R.S. was not cooperating fully with the investigations of its treatment of conservative political groups seeking tax-exempt status during the 2012 election cycle.

“We have a lot of questions,” said an aide to the Ways and Means Committee, which is focusing on suspicions of obstruction. “How long have they known about this? What do you mean they’re completely gone?”

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Lois Lerner refused to answer questions at a hearing in Washington in May. Credit

Separately, the House Oversight Committee is looking into the more technical question of whether the I.R.S. violated its own document-retention rules and provisions of the Federal Records Act, an aide to that committee said. The aides spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, a Republican who is the Ways and Means chairman, called for an “immediate investigation and forensic audit by the Department of Justice as well as the inspector general.”

Republican lawmakers, after first demanding emails directly related to the agency’s scrutiny of political groups, later expanded their inquiry to include all of Ms. Lerner’s emails.

The I.R.S. initially provided 11,000 of her emails that it deemed directly related to the applications for tax exemption filed by political groups. Under pressure from Republican leaders, John Koskinen, the I.R.S. commissioner, agreed to provide all of Ms. Lerner’s emails but said that doing so might take years. Since then, the I.R.S. has provided roughly 32,000 more emails directly from Ms. Lerner’s account.

After the agency discovered that its initial search of Ms. Lerner’s emails was incomplete because of the computer crash, it recovered 24,000 of the missing messages from email accounts on the other end of Ms. Lerner’s correspondence, the I.R.S. said.

Although Mr. Koskinen had indicated in congressional testimony that I.R.S. emails were stored on servers in the agency’s archives and could be recovered, the agency said on Friday that was not the case.

The agency said that because of financial and computing constraints, some emails had been stored only on individuals’ computers and not on servers, and that “backup tapes” from 2011 “no longer exist because they have been recycled.”

The I.R.S. also said that it was not in contact with Ms. Lerner, who quit in September as the head of the agency’s division on tax-exempt organizations, and could not interview her.

Last month, the Republican-led House voted to hold Ms. Lerner in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer lawmakers’ questions about her role in holding up applications for tax exemption from conservative political groups.