Yesterday, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) reported the discovery of more of those “missing” Lerner emails.
Specifically, TIGTA indicated that it has discovered roughly 6,400 previously undisclosed emails related to Lerner. Of the the 6,400 newly found emails, a little more than 10% (650) are tied to 2010 and 2011: there remainder are from 2012.
In response to the announcement, the IRS has released this statement:
We welcome the Inspector General’s recovery of these Lois Lerner emails. This is an encouraging development that will help resolve remaining questions and dispel uncertainty surrounding the emails.
The IRS has been committed to cooperating fully with the investigations. We understand that, during the course of the past 10 months, the Inspector General found about 650 emails from the period affected by the hard-drive crash. It’s important to note that last summer, the IRS produced 24,000 emails from that period.
The IRS will continue to cooperate with the Inspector General and the congressional committees to complete work in this area, and we look forward to the results to determine what additional steps the IRS can take to ensure that we continue to improve our processes.
It’s important to note that the IRS has produced to Congress more than 1.3 million pages of documents related to the investigation, including more than 147,000 emails. Total estimated cost of just the IRS portion is at least $20 million.
(For more about the missing emails, click here. For a more detailed look at the timeline, click here.)
Lois Lerner, the former Director of Exempt Organizations at Internal Revenue Service (IRS), has been a central figure in the bipartisan investigation into the IRS tax exempt organization scandal. The scandal dates back to 2010 when IRS employees, responding to an uptick in tax exempt applications, were asked to scrutinize tax exempt organizations based on politically-charged keywords, the so-called BOLO (“be on the lookout”) listings. An investigation was launched in 2012 and is ongoing.
