Imagine if you downloaded something that ended up wiping out all the information you needed before meeting with an IRS agent asking about discrepancies on your tax return. How sympathetic do you think that IRS agent would be?
But when it comes to the IRS itself, this is just what officials would have us believe. Turns out too it’s not just Lois Lerner, whose computer crashed right after Congress asked for info about the tax targeting of conservative organizations.
Now we’re learning of another case where hard drives holding information that would help tell us what the IRS was up to have gone missing in the midst of a contentious lawsuit. That’s precisely the allegation NetJets, a private jet company, is now making in federal court.
In a suit against the IRS filed in 2011, NetJets claims the IRS improperly forced it to pay a ticket tax that is meant to apply to commercial-airline customers, not private jets. The IRS counter-sued. But in 2012, Congress clarified that NetJets was right, the tax does not apply to it.
In the meantime, key information and evidence has suddenly vanished.
The Columbus Dispatch reports NetJets has filed a motion with US District Court Judge Edmund Sargus Jr., claiming the IRS has “wiped clean a number of computer hard drives containing e-mails and other electronic documents that the government was required to produce” in the company’s lawsuit against the agency.
Maybe the answer here isn’t a federal lawsuit but a computer-repair firm that can debug every computer in the IRS of all that Lois Lerner malware.