To paraphrase a great man: \u201cWell, there they go again.\u201d And this time, while it indeed involves the IRS and their IT operations it doesn\u2019t involve screwing with conservative nonprofit groups.<\/p>\n
Some time ago, the IRS entered into a questionable $2.2 million contract with a law firm. The law firm was to assist with IRS audit activities – but had little experience in handling IRS audit data, and was very expensive ($1000\/hour billing rate). The contract was bad enough to draw Congressional interest \u2013 and could well have been both unnecessary and contrary to Federal law, which appears to restrict performance of IRS audit functions to government employees.<\/p>\n
The matter apparently became the subject of some form of litigation or investigation. As a result, a Federal judge ordered the IRS to preserve the hard drive used on the personal PC of the IRS\u2019s former director of transfer pricing operations at the IRS Large Business and International Division\u2013 and individual named Samuel Maruca. Mr. Maruca (or one of his subordinates) apparently oversaw or influenced the contract in question.<\/p>\n
Do I really need to tell you what happened?<\/p>\n
Yeah, you guessed it. Contrary to the judge\u2019s order, the IRS wiped the drive \u2013 last April, well after the judge had ordered it preserved<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n To me, it seems this means either the IRS’s IT folks are spectacularly incompetent – or someone is deliberately trying to hide something.\u00a0 I can’t see any other plausible explanation for a drive ordered preserved by a Federal judge being wiped after it had been ordered preserved.<\/p>\n But maybe that’s just me.\u00a0 Feel free to draw your own conclusions regarding why the IRS did this.<\/p>\n Oh, did I mention that this had happened before?\u00a0 In March 2014, the IRS deleted “hundreds” of backup tapes containing an estimated 24,000 emails from Lois Lerner<\/a><\/em> – after<\/span> they’d been subpoenaed by Congress.<\/p>\n But remember: this is the \u201cmost transparent Administration in history\u201d.\u00a0 So we’ll shortly be getting a simple, straightforward explanation regarding what happened here\u00a0 – right?<\/p>\n Yeah, right.\u00a0 If you believe that . . . please come talk to me about buying this bridge.\u00a0 I’ll make ya a great<\/em> deal on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"