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21–117 2017

IRS COMMISSIONER JOHN KOSKINEN 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON WAYS AND MEANS 

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED THIRTEENTH CONGRESS 

SECOND SESSION 

JUNE 20, 2014

Serial No. 113–FC19 

Printed for the use of the Committee on Ways and Means 

( 


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COMMITTEE ON WAYS AND MEANS 

DAVE CAMP, Michigan, Chairman 

SAM JOHNSON, Texas 

KEVIN BRADY, Texas 

PAUL RYAN, Wisconsin 

DEVIN NUNES, California 

PATRICK J. TIBERI, Ohio 

DAVID G. REICHERT, Washington 

CHARLES W. BOUSTANY, JR., Louisiana 

PETER J. ROSKAM, Illinois 

JIM GERLACH, Pennsylvania 

TOM PRICE, Georgia 

VERN BUCHANAN, Florida 

ADRIAN SMITH, Nebraska 

AARON SCHOCK, Illinois 

LYNN JENKINS, Kansas 

ERIK PAULSEN, Minnesota 

KENNY MARCHANT, Texas 

DIANE BLACK, Tennessee 

TOM REED, New York 

TODD YOUNG, Indiana 

MIKE KELLY, Pennsylvania 

TIM GRIFFIN, Arkansas 

JIM RENACCI, Ohio 

SANDER M. LEVIN, Michigan 

CHARLES B. RANGEL, New York 

JIM MCDERMOTT, Washington 

JOHN LEWIS, Georgia 

RICHARD E. NEAL, Massachusetts 

XAVIER BECERRA, California 

LLOYD DOGGETT, Texas 

MIKE THOMPSON, California 

JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut 

EARL BLUMENAUER, Oregon 

RON KIND, Wisconsin 

BILL PASCRELL, JR., New Jersey 

JOSEPH CROWLEY, New York 

ALLYSON SCHWARTZ, Pennsylvania 

DANNY DAVIS, Illinois 

LINDA SA ́ NCHEZ, California 

JENNIFER M. SAFAVIAN, Staff Director and General Counsel 

JANICE MAYS, Minority Chief Counsel 


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C O N T E N T S 

Page 

Advisory of June 20, 2014 announcing the hearing .............................................. 2 

WITNESSES 

The Honorable John Koskinen, Commissioner, Internal Revenue Service ......... 8 

SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD 

The Honorable Dave Camp, letter 1 ...................................................................... 25 

The Honorable Dave Camp, letter 2 ...................................................................... 76 

The Honorable Devin Nunes, letter ....................................................................... 79 

The Honorable Kenny Marchant, letter ................................................................. 80 

The Honorable Ron Kind, articles .......................................................................... 82 

Paul Redgate, statement ......................................................................................... 85 


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IRS COMMISSIONER JOHN KOSKINEN 

FRIDAY, JUNE 20, 2014 

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 

COMMITTEE ON WAYS AND MEANS, 

Washington, DC. 

The committee met, pursuant to call, at 9:04 a.m., in Room 100, 

Longworth House Office Building, the Honorable Dave Camp 

[chairman of the committee] presiding. 

[The advisory announcing the hearing follows:] 


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Chairman CAMP. Good morning, the committee will come to 

order. Over 3 years ago this committee started asking the IRS, was 

it targeting conservatives for their beliefs? Was it asking groups inappropriate questions? Was it harassing conservative donors? The 

IRS assured the committee and even testified before Congress time 

and time again that no targeting was occurring. Then as we all recall, 1 year ago in a signature IRS Friday news dump, then head 

of Exempt Organizations at the IRS, Lois Lerner admitted to the 

American people that the IRS targeted conservative organizations. 

The IRS lied to Congress and the American people. In fact, this 

committee has found that there is ample evidence to suggest the 

IRS violated the constitutional rights of taxpayers. As of today, the 

investigation into the IRS’s intentional-organized targeting of 

Americans for their beliefs has been ongoing for over a year. What 

we have found so far is outrageous. The IRS spent over 3 years responding to top Democrat complaints and calls to action to stop all 

activities of conservative groups. The IRS in Washington, D.C. took 

their marching orders and subjected Americans to harassment 

going so far as to question the content of their prayers, and their 

political beliefs, while subjecting them to audits and leaking their 

personal taxpayer information. 

When the scandal first broke out the President vowed that his 

administration would work ‘‘hand in hand with Congress to get this 

thing fixed.’’ And this spring, Commissioner Koskinen, you said 

your goal was to ‘‘find problems quickly, fix them promptly, make 

sure they stayed fixed, and be transparent about the entire process.’’ 

Well, since my time in Congress, I have never seen an IRS so 

broken. Last—late last Friday, the IRS admitted to Congress that 

the agency had lost over 2 year’s worth of Lois Lerner emails and 

blamed the loss on a computer crash. My committee staff later 

learned in an interview that it wasn’t only Ms. Lerner’s emails, but 

the emails of six other individuals relevant to this investigation including the former Acting Commissioner’s chief of staff. 

And just 2 days ago, we found out the IRS and White House 

have known for months and kept it secret from Congress. This is 

not the most open and transparent administration the President 

promised. This is about as far as you can get from getting this 

thing fixed. Now what does this really mean? It means that if the 

IRS’s claim that Ms. Lerner’s hard drive is really unrecoverable, 

the public will never know the full extent of the abuse of Americans who are exercising their First Amendment rights. 

Let me give you an example. Ms. Lerner told TIGTA investigators that she first learned about the Tea Party targeting in July 

of 2011. That wasn’t true. In February of 2011, Ms. Lerner told 

subordinates by email ‘‘Tea Party matter dangerous’’ and discussed 

ways to deny the applications. We only have this email because it 

came from another employee’s inbox. Had Ms. Lerner emailed this 

to the Treasury Department, or Justice, for example, it would be 

gone forever according to the IRS. 

We are missing a huge piece of the puzzle. The years between 

2009 and 2011 are the very peak of when the IRS organized and 

implemented its targeting scheme. How convenient for the IRS and 

the administration. 


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I find it hard to believe and I don’t believe the IRS went through 

every possible exercise to recover these documents. We are missing 

the emails of seven IRS officials during periods critical to this investigation. How is this possible? Making matters worse, the IRS 

kept all of this a secret from the public for months while quickly 

informing political staff in the administration. After all of the obstruction, I fear this Congress and the American people cannot 

take the IRS at its word. 

One thing is for certain. You can blame it on a technical glitch. 

It is not a technical glitch to mislead the American people. You say 

that you have lost the emails, but what you have lost is all credibility. The IRS is in charge of hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ 

information, and you are now saying your technology system was 

so poor that year’s worth of emails are forever unrecoverable. How 

does that put anyone at ease? 

How far would the excuse of ‘‘I lost it’’ get with the IRS for an 

average American trying to file the yearly taxes who may have lost 

a few receipts? Oddly enough, this seems a satisfactory answer for 

the Attorney General. As far as I can tell, this administration has 

done nothing to investigate what truly happened, notwithstanding 

this committee sending the Department of Justice a detailed referral letter of nearly 100 pages. They have repeatedly tried to sweep 

this under a rug and claimed no wrongdoing without ever looking 

for the facts. 

The American people have no reason to trust the IRS or, frankly, 

the administration on this issue. To wait years to reveal the fact 

the IRS was targeting the American people and then wait months 

to reveal your conveniently missing years of documents, well, it’s 

no wonder I have heard the word ‘‘cover-up’’ thrown about a lot 

this week. The time for denials, delays, obstructions, and attempts 

to blow this off as a phony scandal are over. This committee is fed 

up and we expect some answers not only—from not only the IRS, 

but the whole administration. It is time we restore the American 

people’s trust in their government, but I fear with recent events 

that may not be possible. 

And now Mr. Levin, I will recognize you for an opening statement. 

Mr. LEVIN. Thank you. On September 11, 2013, the Internal 

Revenue Service provided this committee with one of the 770,000 

pages of documents it has turned over since Ways and Means undertook its investigation into the IRS in May 2013. In total, more 

than 250 IRS employees have spent over 120,000 hours working to 

produce documents at a cost of at least $16 million to taxpayers. 

That document received last September, last September, included 

an email from Lois Lerner, to other IRS personnel dated June 14, 

2011. It began: ‘‘My computer crashed yesterday.’’ We now know 

the full extent of that equipment failure. Despite an exhaustive effort by forensic IT professionals at the IRS, they were unable to 

save her hard drive and her emails between January 1, 2009 and 

April 2011. 

Although her emails from June 1, 2009, through April 2011 are 

unrecoverable from her hard drive, the IRS will produce 67,000 

emails related to Lois Lerner. The IRS has or will be producing 

24,000 emails that have been recovered from the period before her 


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computer crashed. They recovered these emails from other IRS employees. That is on top of more than 43,000 emails involving Ms. 

Lerner after April 2011 that have already been produced. 

There is absolutely no evidence, absolutely no evidence to show 

that Ms. Lerner’s computer crash was anything more than equipment failure. At the time of the incident in June 2011, IRS computer experts reviewed the issue and informed Lois Lerner that 

‘‘Unfortunately the news is not good. The sectors on the hard drive 

were bad which made your data unrecoverable.’’ 

Was her computer crash a conspiracy? No. Was the Internal Revenue Service’s system for backing up its email system entirely underfunded and wholly deficient? Clearly, yes. In fact, Congress has 

cut the IRS budget for operations which includes what it spends on 

computers and other information technology every year for the last 

5 years. House Republicans are proposing to slash it once again 

next year. 

Commissioner Koskinen, who we welcome here today, has informed this committee that the IRS has $1 billion worth of computer equipment and that the agency should be spending $150 million to $200 million on maintenance for that equipment. Instead, 

the agency spends virtually nothing because it cannot afford to 

properly maintain what it has. 

It is important to remember the emails were routinely lost during the Bush administration. In one instance in 2007, according to 

a report by Democrats in the Oversight and Government Reform 

Committee, the Bush White House acknowledged having lost nearly 5 million emails between March 2003 and October 2005 related 

to allegations of the politically motivated dismissal of U.S. attorneys. 

Lost data under the Bush administration, coupled with the number of computer crashes at the IRS, clearly demonstrate the need 

for government agencies to have adequate budgets to invest, upgrade, and maintain information technology. My colleagues on the 

other side of the aisle have taken this opportunity to rehash wellworn allegations of White House involvement; allegations that Republicans have made from the very moment the Inspector General 

released his report more than a year ago. 

On the day the report was released, before congressional investigation into the issue had even begun, Chairman Issa accused the 

White House of ‘‘Targeting its political enemies.’’ Three days later, 

our chairman, Mr. Camp in your opening statement during the 

first hearing on this matter, you accused the White House of a culture of cover-up. Congressional Republicans are so determined to 

find a needle in a haystack that they seek desperately to add to 

the haystack even though no needle has been discovered. It was in 

that vein that Chairman Camp this week said that this entire case 

started with the White House, and sent a letter to the President 

requesting all correspondence between Lois Lerner and the executive office of the President between January 2009 and May 2011, 

the period before Ms. Lerner’s hard drive crashed. 

The White House has conducted that search, and what have they 

found? There was not a single email correspondence sent to or from 

Ms. Lerner and the White House. 


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This committee has been involved in this investigation for over 

a year. Here is what we have learned: The 501(c)(4) applications 

of both conservative and progressive groups were inappropriately 

screened. There were long delays in processing applications. There 

were serious mismanagement, and I was among the very first to 

call for Ms. Lerner and then Commissioner Miller to be relieved of 

their duties. 

In all of the 770,000 pages of documents that the IRS has supplied congressional committees, including ours, there has not been 

any evidence of political motivation or of White House involvement. 

Now there have been computer failures at the IRS, and Republican 

conspiracy theories have started anew. The evidence to date reinforces this long-evident truth: The prevailing conspiracy in this 

matter is that of the Republicans’ desire to stir their base, tie the 

problem to the White House, and keep up this drum beat until the 

November election. 

I am glad that you, Commissioner Koskinen, is here with us 

today to set the record straight. We are glad you are here. You 

started at the IRS last December after a distinguished career in 

the public and private sectors; at OMB, at Freddie Mac, as the 

chair of President Clinton’s Y2K computer council. So again, we 

welcome your testimony. We are glad you are here. We look forward to your testimony to set the record straight. 

Chairman CAMP. All right, thank you. Before I recognize Commissioner Koskinen for his opening statement I ask that he stand 

to be sworn in. 

[Witness sworn.] 

Chairman CAMP. Let the record reflect the witness answered in 

the affirmative. Thank you. Commissioner Koskinen, thank you for 

being with us today. You will have 5 minutes to present your testimony with your full written statement submitted for the record. 

You are now recognized for 5 minutes. 

STATEMENT OF COMMISSIONER JOHN KOSKINEN, INTERNAL 

REVENUE SERVICE 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Chairman Camp, Ranking Member Levin, and 

Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to provide you with an update on recent IRS 

document productions to Congress. The IRS has, over the past 

year, made a massive document production in response to inquiries 

from Congress. In March, the IRS advised this committee and the 

Senate Finance Committee that we had completed the production 

of documents identified as relating to their investigation of the 

processing and review of applications for tax-exempt status as described in the May 2013 report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration known as TIGTA. 

Those production efforts included 11,000 emails from Lois 

Lerner, former director of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division. 

This committee and the Senate Finance Committee has noted have 

now received more than 770,000 pages of unredacted materials. We 

are sending another production to you later today of additional 

Lerner emails. You already have more than 25,000 emails from Ms. 

Lerner’s computer account, and more than 5,000 emails from other 


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custodians’ accounts for which Mrs. Lerner was an author or recipient. 

The IRS expects, as noted earlier in my conversation with you, 

to complete its production of the remaining Lerner emails to this 

committee by the end of the month. At that time, you will have all 

of the emails, 43,000 of them that we have from Ms. Lerner’s computer and email account for the period January 2009 through May 

2013. In addition, as noted you will have 24,000 Lerner emails 

from other custodian accounts during the period that her hard 

drive was crashed for a total of 67,000 Lerner emails. 

In the course of responding to congressional requests, the IRS in 

February reviewed the email available from Ms. Lerner’s custodial 

computer accounts which had been date limited and limited by 

search terms we had worked out with investigators and identified 

the possibility of an issue because the date distribution of the email 

was uneven. It was not clear then whether Lerner emails were 

overlooked, missing, or had other technical issues involved. IRS information technology professionals identified documents that indicated Ms. Lerner had experienced a computer failure in 2011. As 

Congressman Levin noted, some of those emails had earlier been 

provided last fall to this committee. 

In mid-March 2014, the IRS focused on redacting materials for 

the non-tax writing committees and processing the rest of Ms. 

Lerner’s email for production. As we reviewed additional Lerner 

emails not limited by search terms, relevance, or subject matter, in 

other words, all of her emails, the IRS review team learned additional facts regarding Ms. Lerner’s computer crash in mid-2011 

which occurred before these investigations opened or the IG’s report began. 

We learned that in 2011 the IRS Information Technology Division had tried using multiple processes at Ms. Lerner’s request to 

recover the information stored on her computer’s hard drive. A series of emails available after all of Ms. Lerner’s email was loaded, 

recounts the sequence of events in 2011. A frontline manager in IT 

reported to Ms. Lerner in an email on July 20th, 2011, ‘‘I checked 

with the technician and he still has your drive. He wanted to exhaust all avenues to recover the data before sending it to the harddrive cemetery. Unfortunately, after receiving assistance from several highly-skilled technicians including HP experts, he still cannot 

recover the data.’’ 

Ms. Lerner was told by email on August 1, 2011, ‘‘as a last resort 

we sent your hard drive to CI—that’s the IRS Criminal Investigation Division forensic lab to attempt data recovery.’’ 

In an email on August 5, 2011, after 3 weeks of attempts to retrieve her emails at Lois Lerner’s request, Ms. Lerner was advised 

‘‘Unfortunately, the news is not good. The sectors on the hard drive 

were bad which made your data unrecoverable. I am very sorry. 

Everyone involved tried their best.’’ 

The committee has been provided earlier these emails earlier 

this spring. In light of the hard-drive issue, the IRS took multiple 

steps over the past months to assess the situation and produce as 

much email as possible for which Ms. Lerner was an author or recipient. We retraced the collection process for her emails. We located, processed, and included email from an unrelated 2011 data 


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collection for Ms. Lerner. We confirmed the backup tapes from 

2011 no longer existed because they had been recycled pursuant to 

the IRS normal policy. We searched email from other custodians for 

material on which Ms. Lerner appears as author or recipient. From 

mid-March to late April, the IRS review team concentrated on loading for review all of the remaining email from Ms. Lerner’s account, and then repeating the entire process for quality control and 

to ensure that no new emails from Ms. Lerner were missing. During this time into May we also were identifying and reviewing 

Lerner emails to and from 82 other custodians. By mid-May as a 

result of these efforts, the IRS had identified the 24,000 Lerner 

emails between January 1 and April of 2011. 

As the search for and production of Lerner emails was concluding, I asked those working on this matter to determine whether computer systems of the other 82 custodians had experienced 

any similar difficulties, especially in light of the aged equipment 

the IRS has been increasingly using as a result of its budget pressures. 

After the IRS report on Ms. Lerner’s email production was delivered last Friday to Congress, it was determined earlier this week, 

actually on Monday, that seven additional custodians had experienced hard drive failures during the search period. A hard-drive 

failure does not automatically mean that any or all emails have 

been lost or cannot be reconstructed. Given the extremely broad 

scope of our production effort, it is not surprising that we would 

discover that some employees had encountered some technical 

issues, especially in light of the agency’s aging information technology infrastructure. 

As you know, the IRS described in great detail in its public report last week its efforts to produce Lerner emails. We are still assessing what effect, if any, hard drive crashes had on the emails 

of any other custodian. At this time, it is too earlier to know if any 

emails have been lost on any of those hard drives. We are committed to continually to working cooperatively and transparently 

with you, this committee, and we will continue to provide you with 

updates. This concludes my testimony. I would be happy to take 

your questions. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Koskinen follows:] 


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Chairman CAMP. Well, thank you. What I didn’t hear in that 

was an apology to this committee. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I don’t think an apology is owed. There is—not 

a single email has been lost since the start of this investigation. 

Every email has been preserved that we have. We have produced 

or will produce by the end of this—— 

Chairman CAMP. You don’t think the time period between January 2009 and April 2011, is relevant to this investigation? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. It is a very relevant time frame. 

Chairman CAMP. Let me ask you this: The letter that we received from the IRS on Friday the 13th, admitted the Lerner 

emails were lost for this 2.5-year period. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. They were lost off—they were lost off her hard 

drive. We also advised you—— 

Chairman CAMP. Let me finish. I am not finished with my question. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I’m sorry. 

Chairman CAMP. And I will give you an opportunity to answer. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That’s fine. 

Chairman CAMP. But you failed to explain the timeline of events 

that led to that admission. And my question to you is, from the 

interviews that we have had with the deputy chief of information— 

the Deputy Chief Information Officer for the IRS, I am told that 

the IRS knew as early as February that her computer crash supposedly caused the loss of her emails during the time period of January 2009 to 2011. Has the IRS known since February? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. The IRS knew in February there was an issue. 

As noted, we all had emails from Ms. Lerner last fall in which she 

recited that she had had a hard drive cash. 

Chairman CAMP. So in February you knew the emails were 

missing? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No. In February what we knew was there was 

a problem because we were looking at it from the standpoint of 

where, what the time frame was in which her emails appeared, and 

it appeared that that there were not enough emails in that time 

frame. 

Chairman CAMP. So why didn’t you—why didn’t the IRS notify 

Congress at that time there was a problem with the potential loss 

of the emails we were investigating? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Because I thought it was important. It was my 

decision that we complete the investigation so we could fully advise 

you as what the situation was. 

Chairman CAMP. Now, I got a letter from the White House 2 

days ago that says that Treasury contacted the White House in 

April—in April of this year to tell them about the lost emails. Who 

told the Treasury Department? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Pardon? 

Chairman CAMP. Who told the Treasury Department? The letter 

I received from the White House says that Treasury told them in 

April of 2014. So my question is, who told the Treasury Department? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. My understanding, only from that letter which 

I have seen which does not say that emails have been lost. My understanding of the letter says that someone in the general counsel’s 


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office at the IRS informed the general counsel’s office at Treasury 

that there was an issue and the IRS was investigating. 

Chairman CAMP. No. The letter says that Treasury was told— 

that Treasury told the White House—we also have a letter from 

Treasury that says that they learned in April of 2014. Who told 

Treasury? And do you know who in Treasury told the White 

House? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I have no idea. I have no communications with 

the White House. 

Chairman CAMP. Well, you are the head of the IRS. You don’t 

know of something this important, the contacts between your agency and the executive branch? You are unaware of them? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. We are part of the executive branch. We have 

regular communications with Treasury. We issue regulations, we 

review them. We are in the process of reviewing, for instance, the 

regulations on the 501(c) issue. We have regular communication, 

particularly between our counsel’s office and the Treasury counsel. 

Chairman CAMP. Well, if the IRS knew in February or maybe 

even March and Treasury and White House knew at least in April, 

but Congress and the American people didn’t find out until June, 

were you purposely not telling us? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No. 

Chairman CAMP. Were you purposely not revealing this to the 

American people? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No, as I told you, my proposal was, and in fact, 

our original thought was to complete the Lois Lerner email production, complete the review of what other custodians had a problem, 

and produce a report to you laying it all out. 

Chairman CAMP. So why did you tell—why did the IRS inform 

the executive branch agencies, the White House, the administration, but kept it secret from the Congress who was conducting an 

investigation? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. We were not keeping it a secret. It was our 

public report to you that has, in fact, provided you this information. 

There has been no attempt to keep it a secret. My position has 

been that when we provide information, we should provide it completely. If we provide you incomplete information, people sometimes are tempted to leap to the wrong conclusion, not based on 

any fact, so we thought it would be important to give you the full 

description of what—— 

Chairman CAMP. It is okay for them to leap to a conclusion. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Pardon? 

Chairman CAMP. It is okay for the White House and Treasury 

to leap to a conclusion 6 weeks before the Congress, but my question also is, have there been discussions within the IRS about when 

to reveal this information to Congress? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Certainly. 

Chairman CAMP. And obviously, these discussions included 

Treasury? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No. 

Chairman CAMP. Well, then how did Treasury find out about it? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Treasury in a conversation I am not aware of 

apparently the first time I knew about that was that White 

House—— 


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Chairman CAMP. I will have a lot of questions to write to you, 

to have follow-up with you. This is completely unacceptable. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Can I answer the question to make the record 

straight? 

Chairman CAMP. Well, I don’t think you are giving me an answer and I want to move on to another topic. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. All right. 

Chairman CAMP. Your letter describes the Lois Lerner emails as 

being unrecoverable. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Correct. 

Chairman CAMP. But failed to mention where the damaged hard 

drive is today. Do you know where the actual hard drive is that 

crashed in 2011? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I am advised the actual hard drive, after it was 

determined that it was dysfunctional and that with experts no 

emails could be retrieved, was recycled and destroyed in the normal process. 

Chairman CAMP. So was it physically destroyed? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That’s my understanding. 

Chairman CAMP. So was it melted down, do you know? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I have no idea what the recycler does with it. 

This was 3 years ago. 

Chairman CAMP. Does the IRS have a system for tracking 

items? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Tracking what? 

Chairman CAMP. Items? Does the IRS have a system for tracking items? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. We track items. We don’t track every item that 

everybody has everywhere, but I am sure we track some items. We 

track—— 

Chairman CAMP. Does someone there have a serial number for 

that hard drive? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I do not know whether they do or not. I am just 

advised that in normal case, when a hard drive fails, the email cannot be reconstructed. The hard drive is turned over to recyclers. 

Chairman CAMP. Well, it seems to me that if it was recycled, 

the government property would have been tracked. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Pardon? 

Chairman CAMP. It seems to me that if it was recycled, government property would have been tracked or people could simply 

walk away with property from the IRS. So I assume there is a 

tracking system for the disposal of government property. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. There is tracking system for computers. My understanding is that Lois Lerner’s computer continued to be functioning with a new hard drive. The hard drive fits with inside. I 

am not aware whether a hard drives have computer—have identifiers. 

Chairman CAMP. Can we get the serial number of this hard 

drive and all of the other employees whose hard drives have been— 

whose emails have been lost? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. If they have serial numbers, you are welcome 

to them. 

Chairman CAMP. All right. Because I want that hard drive and 

I want the hard drive of every computer that crashed during that 


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time frame. So you know, what I have learned in the last week, I 

think calls into question every document and response the IRS has 

given, or for that matter, has failed to give to this committee. And 

the only way I can see any hope of restoring any confidence is to 

establish a special prosecutor with the authorities, the powers, and 

the resources needed to uncover the truth. So for the sake of the 

agency and to restore the trust of the American people, will you 

support the appointment of a special prosecutor? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. There are six investigations going on of this 

event now. 

Chairman CAMP. Yes, sir, I know. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. The IG is already investigating this. 

Chairman CAMP. Can you give a definitive answer to this committee? Yes or no, do you support the appointment of a special 

prosecutor? I am controlling the time. I am asking a question that 

can have a simple yes or no answer—— 

VOICE. You are trying to control the answer. 

Chairman CAMP. Regular order. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I think the appointment of a special prosecutor 

after the six investigations ongoing, and the IG investigation into 

this matter ongoing, would be a monumental waste of taxpayer 

funds. 

Mr. BREWER. So is that a yes or a no? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That’s a no. 

Chairman CAMP. Thank you. Mr. Levin is recognized. You have 

5 minutes. 

Mr. LEVIN. You know, I think the witness deserve some respect. 

I think it is in the tradition of this committee to give witnesses respect. This is not the committee of decades ago led by people who 

disrespected witnesses. 

Mr. Koskinen, you had a long career. What have you done in the 

years of your career briefly? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I am sorry. What have I done what? 

Mr. LEVIN. What has your career been like? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. My career has been 20 years in the private sector turning around large troubled organizations. I started my career as the chief of staff for Senator Ribicoff for 4 years in the 

United States Senate. I served on a Presidential Commission as a 

staff member during the Kerner Commission in late 1960s. I represented New York City here for a year and a half. I was the Deputy Director for Management at OMB for 3 years. I was the chair 

of the President’s Council on the Year 2000, for 2 years guiding the 

country through the year 2000 transition. I was asked by the Bush 

administration to take over Freddie Mac as the chairman of the 

board when the government took over those enterprises, and I was 

asked to come to the IRS, which I did in last December when I was 

confirmed to steer the agency through these difficult times. 

Mr. LEVIN. The letter that went from the counsel of the President to Mr. Camp and Mr. Wyden, spelled this out and indicated 

when the Treasury was notified, or when the Treasury counsel informed the White House counsel about this problem with the computer. It also has indicated, contrary to this effort by the committee 

on the Republican side to connect the problems, and there were seVerDate Sep 11 2014 10:20 Feb 07, 2017 Jkt 021117 PO 00000 Frm 00024 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 I:\WAYS\OUT\21117.XXX 21117

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rious problems with the White House, that there is no such connection. 

They are desperate to find a connection. They have never found 

it. They will keep looking because I think it makes sense for them 

politically. I don’t think whatever our political affiliations are, we 

should be disrespectful. 

So will you repeat again what happened these last months after 

you found out about the computer crash, and why you decided to 

conduct yourself the way you did? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. We learned in February that—I learned in February that there was a potential issue with her hard drive. That 

was investigated through March, by the end of March into early 

April the IT people had uncovered the emails train, you can see, 

that talked about the effort to restore her computer. Those emails 

have been provided some time ago to this committee, so they were 

not hidden or covered up. Thereafter, I told people that we needed—we decided we would look at all of the other custodians to 

produce as many emails as we could that were, in fact, within our 

system which is the 24,000. I also asked that we actually review 

all of the 82 custodians to see what if any failures that happened 

then. 

Our plan was when we produced—completed the production of 

all of the Lois Lerner emails at the end of this month, we would 

provide a full report, and by that time we would know what the 

situation was with the custodians. There has been a question of 

why I didn’t advise Congress earlier, and my experience has been, 

we do better to have a rational discussion when you know all of the 

facts. It is shown by the fact that on Monday—we were advised 

Monday morning that there were preliminary indications that 

there were difficulties with a handful of custodians. That information was passed on to the staff of this committee on Monday afternoon. 

Immediately thereafter, rather than asking us for additional information, a press release went out from this committee identifying 

Nikole Flax as a particularly interesting person to this committee, 

and stating that Nikole Flax emails had been lost. 

Had the committee waited to issue that release until we knew 

further information which we are continuing to derive, they would 

have discovered that Nikole Flax had two computers; her office 

computer which she used during the day, and she had a travel 

computer, a portable. It was the portable computer that crashed. 

It ran on the same email system as her office system. So it turns 

out there is no indication that a single Nikole Flax email has been 

lost, notwithstanding the press release and statements out of this 

committee. 

So those press releases with regard to Nikole Flax were inaccurate and misleading, and it demonstrates why we will provide 

this committee a full report about the custodian review when it is 

completed. We are not going to dribble out the information and 

have it played out in the press. 

Chairman CAMP. The time is expired. Mr. Johnson is recognized. 

Mr. JOHNSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for holding this hearing. You know, learning about the loss of Lois Lerner’s 


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emails and other IRS officials is troubling, and we received that information with great skepticism. Americans have been waiting for 

the whole truth and we hope to get it today. It doesn’t sound like 

we are getting it. It is past time to hold all of those responsible accountable for targeting Americans for their beliefs. 

Mr. Commissioner, welcome. I have some questions for you. You 

have argued that the IRS’s practice of destroying employee emails 

after 6 months was a cost-cutting measure. In fiscal year 2011, the 

IRS-enacted budget was $12 billion, a high watermark of spending. 

Can you tell me whether in 2011 the IRS was engaged in a policy 

of destroying and reusing its backup tapes? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Actually what happened with the IRS, in 2008 

when our new IT director came, the retention policy then was only 

for less than 3 months. In 2008, he increased the retention backup 

policy to 6 months. It is a disaster recovery system. So if the entire 

system goes down, you can reconstitute the emails. Those systems 

actually are usable and then if there is no disaster you continue 

to produce and backup the emails so they are available. I would 

note as I did in my testimony, since the start of this investigation, 

every email has been preserved. Nothing has been lost, nothing has 

been destroyed. 

Mr. JOHNSON. Yeah, which tells me that you have got plenty 

of computer space. You know, I wondered at the time how could 

you keep track of everybody’s IRS requirements when you lose your 

own. 

Let me just ask you: Didn’t the IRS estimate that keeping and storing those tapes would only cost $200,000 annually? Mr. KOSKINEN. It costs $200,000 annually every year, but it 

grows. We collect—we have trillions now of terabytes as it is called, 

where you have hundreds of millions of emails stored over 6 

months and the disaster recovery program was that—it is not—the 

email system, as I said in my testimony, is not a system of record. 

A system of record is in fact, or the Records Act to produce hard 

copies, and file those in the records. So that the IRS has historically only preserved backup tapes for 6 months. 

We are reviewing all of this. I have told people some months ago, 

when we get through with this, we need to take a look at what we 

can do to actually create a more searchable email process. The 

problem right now is any time anybody wants a piece of information, we have 90,000 employees, whatever employees want, we 

have to pull their email accounts. We have to pull their hard 

drives, and then we have to take them and load them into a search 

machine to be able to discover what’s in them. 

That is an antiquated system. I fondly referred to our IT system 

at a Model T with a very nice GPS system, and a sound system, 

and a redone engine, but it is still a Model T. 

Mr. JOHNSON. You know, my constituents and I refuse to accept that in years of record-high IRS budgets, you know, you 

wouldn’t let us refuse to give you information on our tax returns, 

the IRS destroyed employee emails every 6 months just to save 

$200,000 annually. I am far too familiar with the rampant wasteful 

spending at the IRS during that time. 

To date, the committee has uncovered wasteful spending from 

the Star Trek videos, to the spending on lavish conferences, to an 


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IRS estimated $23.5 million in spending on salary and benefits due 

to union time, and to bonuses going to workers who owe back 

taxes. 

Mr. Commissioner, you and I both know the IRS failure to back 

up employee emails began long before any budget cuts happened 

to that agency. There’s simply no excuse for what happened. I yield 

back. 

Chairman CAMP. All right, Mr. McDermott is recognized for 

minutes. 

Mr. MCDERMOTT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Today we are 

here listening to a myth that there was a conspiracy by Ms. Lerner, 

and whoever else, to get rid of some data. And before I came to 

Congress, I was a physician. And one of the things you always did 

with a patient was take a history. And I would like to review the 

history again with you, Mr. Koskinen. On June 13th, 2011, Lois 

Lerner’s hard drive failed, meaning all of her emails were lost at 

that point, is that true? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That’s correct. 

Mr. MCDERMOTT. Sixteen days later, she was briefed that inappropriate criteria had been used in mismanagement in Cincinnati according to the IG’s report. Is that true? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That’s what the report reports. 

Mr. MCDERMOTT. Well, the question then is, did Lois Lerner 

preemptively crash her hard drive? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. All of the evidence is to the contrary. The email 

string I told you shows that at her request, extraordinary efforts 

were made to retrieve the emails from her crashed hard drive. 

Mr. MCDERMOTT. Did you think, did she foresee something 

happening in the future and make the decision to destroy her own 

hard drive? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. The record shows quite the contrary. Also, after 

the crash on April 11, she continued to send and archive emails on 

her computer. We have produced—will produce 43,000 of those. So 

if she was going to, in fact, try to hide emails, there is no indication 

in the record that her performance demonstrated that. 

Mr. MCDERMOTT. In all of the emails that have been collected, 

is there any evidence to suggest that she called the White House 

or the White House called her and said, get those right-wing organizations? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. There is none that we have been able to 

produce and I understand, although I have not seen the production 

from the White House, that the White House did not find any 

email to or from Lois Lerner. 

Mr. MCDERMOTT. And the Inspector General didn’t find them 

in his—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No, my understanding, the Inspector General’s 

report stated there was no evidence of political involvement. 

Mr. MCDERMOTT. In fact, as you quote, as you talked about, 

on July 19th, 2011, Lerner wrote to Lillie Wilburn, who is the field 

director of customer service support for informational technology 

saying, whatever you can do is helpful, would be greatly appreciated. 

Now, in mid-July 2011, she learned about Cincinnati. And for a 

couple of weeks the IT division tried to repair her hard drive, 


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bringing in experts inside IT, and also the forensic division of the 

IRS, is that correct? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That’s correct. 

Mr. MCDERMOTT. And they failed? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. They failed after 3 weeks of efforts. The email 

trail is clear. I would note as I did in my full testimony, the Criminal Investigation Division is expert at in seizures from—in civil 

and criminal cases seizing hard drives and restoring emails. So we 

had at the time apparently great confidence if you could find those 

emails, they would find them, and they were unsuccessful. 

Mr. MCDERMOTT. Finally, she wrote: ‘‘Thanks for your efforts’’ 

to them, ‘‘I really do appreciate the efforts, sometimes stuff happens.’’ 

Now is this a woman rejoicing over losing her hard drive and 

saying, thank God that thing is gone? They are never going to get 

me? No. It is a woman who is resigned, really, to the fact that the 

thing is lost. 

In my office, we just upgraded. We upgraded to Windows 2010, 

and my staff director in Washington State lost her hard drive. 

They fried it. I don’t know how it happened. Nobody knows how it 

happened. She lost all of her records. She did not rejoice over that 

experience, I can tell you that. But then we come fast forward to 

February 2014, and Chairman Camp asked for all, and I emphasize, all of Lois’ emails. Is there anything you can see in the time 

that you have been there, that they didn’t, that the IRS did not do 

to try and get all? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. There’s no indication. As I said, we have gone 

to great lengths. We retraced the process for producing her email 

twice just to make sure that no email was missing. We understand 

the importance of this investigation. We have gone to great lengths, 

spent a significant amount of money trying to make sure that there 

is no email that is required that has not been produced. 

Mr. MCDERMOTT. I understand you sort of backtracked and 

went out to 83 people in the agency that she had contact with and 

retrieved their emails to try and get the emails for the committee? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That’s correct, and that’s why rather than having lost Lois Lerner emails as if there are none of them, we have 

been able to produce over time and will by the end of this month, 

24,000 Lois Lerner emails from the time frame in question. 

Chairman CAMP. The time has expired. I would ask unanimous 

consent to put into the record a letter from this committee, from 

me as chairman to then-Commissioner Doug Shulman on June 3rd, 

2011, asking for the names, titles, and divisions of any individuals 

who are involved in investigating taxpayer contributions to 

501(c)(4)s, which was sent to the IRS 10 days before Lois Lerner’s 

email crash. And with that, I would yield to Mr. Brady. 

Mr. MCDERMOTT. Point of information, Mr. Chairman. 

Chairman CAMP. Yes. So the letter without objection is put into 

the record. 

[The letter follows:] 


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Mr. MCDERMOTT. Yes. Point of information. Was that letter 

circulated to Members of the Committee? 

Chairman CAMP. The letter was signed by me and sent to the 

Commissioner of the IRS, on behalf of the committee. 

Mr. MCDERMOTT. Oh, so none of us have seen it? Okay. Thank 

you. 

Chairman CAMP. You may have seen it. It has certainly been— 

we can get one to you. We can get you a copy. But I think as long 

as you are bringing up a timeline, we ought to get a complete picture of the timeline which is the email crash occurred 10 days after 

the first letter went to the IRS. 

Mr. MCDERMOTT. I appreciate that. 

Chairman CAMP. Mr. Brady is recognized. 

Mr. BRADY. When were you told about the problems with the 

Lerner emails? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Pardon? 

Mr. BRADY. When were you told—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. February is when I was told that they had discovered there was an issue with her email. 

Mr. BRADY. In February? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. In February. 

Mr. BRADY. Why did you choose to withhold that information 

from this congressional investigation? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I had no intention of withholding that information. As I have stated, our plan was to investigate and find out 

what the details were. At that point we did not know whether 

there had been a crash that had affected her emails or not. 

Mr. BRADY. You just testified that you gave your agency 3 

weeks to determine if it could be retrievable or not. They weren’t 

successful, so giving you the benefit of the doubt, in March, you 

knew those emails were not available. Why didn’t you inform this 

congressional investigation then? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. As I told you, my goal was to, in fact, determine all of the facts so we could give you a full report. As I noted 

earlier—earlier this week, we provided—— 

Mr. BRADY. Yes, you informed. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Do I get to answer the question? 

Mr. LEVIN. Could the witness answer the question? 

Chairman CAMP. You know, regular order, Mr. Levin. The gentleman from Texas has the time and he is questioning appropriately, so please no more interruptions. 

Mr. LEVIN. Regular order allows a witness to answer a question. 

Chairman CAMP. Regular order allows the witness to conduct 

his questioning as he sees fit. This committee has given broad latitude to Members of both parties to do that. 

Chairman CAMP. The time is restored to Mr. Brady. 

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, parliamentary inquiry. 

Chairman CAMP. Please continue. 

Mr. BECERRA. Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Chairman. 

Chairman CAMP. The gentleman will state his parliamentary inquiry. 

Mr. BECERRA. Under the rules of the House, every Member has 

5 minutes to pose questions to the witness and the witness is given 


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an opportunity and right to respond. Is the chairman saying that 

the witness does not have a right to respond to the question? 

Chairman CAMP. We are—the gentleman has had plenty of time 

to respond. That is not a parliamentary inquiry. Mr. Brady has the 

time. 

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, my question is, does the witness 

have a right to respond to the question? 

Chairman CAMP. The gentleman has not stated a parliamentary 

inquiry. The gentleman from Texas. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Start again with the question. 

Mr. BRADY. You knew in March that you withheld information 

from this congressional investigation. And in May you assured this 

committee that all of Ms. Lerner’s emails would be provided to us, 

yet you knew that that was not possible. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No, in fact, I knew that, in fact, we would provide you all of the Lois Lerner emails that we had. 

Mr. BRADY. You already knew in March they were not retrievable. A, you didn’t inform the congressional investigation; B, 2 

months later, you told us you would provide all of the emails without limitations. And you knew you didn’t have them. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. By March I did not know that they were not 

retrievable and in fact, we had received—we have retrieved—— 

Mr. BRADY. You just testified to Mr. McDermott—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN [continuing]. 24,000 of those emails. 

Mr. BRADY [continuing]. That that was the case, you knew. And 

in April, your agency informed Treasury about the problem, and 

Treasury agreed with you that Congress should be told as soon as 

it was able to. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Our—— 

Mr. BRADY. Yet you didn’t provide the information. And then 

you assured us you would provide all of the emails without limitation, with no mention that you then knew 2, 3 months into this, 

that they weren’t retrievable. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. As noted, and I think your record should make 

it clear, all of this issue is as a result of providing you a public and 

fulsome document about this matter. So we have not been hiding 

from you. 

Mr. BRADY. Mr. Commissioner, sending a letter months after 

you knew the emails were supposedly lost, withholding the information from the investigation—you were aware there was a congressional investigation, right? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I was aware there was an investigation. 

Mr. BRADY. So you withheld the information? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. We did not withhold the information. 

Mr. BRADY. You misled Congress in May when you said those 

emails would be provided. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. We have provided you the information. And it 

turns out you had the information for some time. 

Mr. BRADY. Mr. Commissioner, you did not tell me under oath 

that you told us in February, in March, in April, in May that the 

information was lost? That was just what you said. Tell us that 

again, that we knew. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. In February and March and until April, I did 

not know if any information was lost. 


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Mr. BRADY. Yet, your agency had already, in April, communicated with Treasury Department about the problem. And the letter we have from Treasury says, we agreed with the IRS that it 

should inform Congress as soon as it is able. That is the letter 

today that exactly disputes what you just told us under oath. Exactly disputes it. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That letter from Treasury reveals and provides 

to you all of the Lois Lerner emails so that there is no issue that 

any Lois Lerner email provided to anyone outside—— 

Mr. BRADY. Mr. Fitzpayne, Assistant Secretary for Legislative 

Affairs ‘‘Treasury agreed with the IRS that it should inform Congress as soon as it was able.’’ Yet, you did not. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. We actually have provided you the information. 

My goal was to—— 

Mr. BRADY. You have not provided us any information. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Well—— 

Mr. BRADY. In fact, we didn’t learn until last week and then 

this week that you had supposedly lost the emails not just from 

Ms. Lerner, but other persons of interest in the IRS. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. There is no evidence that any of those emails 

have been lost either. And in fact, as I said earlier, my process has 

been to make sure that we had all of the facts when we provided 

them to you, so that in fact—— 

Mr. BRADY. Why at this point, why should anyone believe you? 

The IRS denied for 2 years targeting of Americans based on their 

political beliefs. That wasn’t the truth. They said it was a few 

rogue agents in Cincinnati. That wasn’t the truth. You said you 

were targeting liberal organizations. That wasn’t the truth. And 

then you assured us you would provide us all of the emails in May 

and that wasn’t the truth. And today you are telling us out of thousands of IRS computers, the one that lost the emails was a person 

of interest in an ongoing congressional investigation. 

Mr. CROWLEY. The gentleman’s time is expired. Point of order. 

Mr. BRADY. And that is not the truth, either. This is the most 

corrupt and deceitful IRS in the history. 

Chairman CAMP. The gentleman’s time is expired. Mr. Lewis is 

recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. LEWIS. Mr. Commissioner, first of all, I want to thank you 

for your service. Thank you for your patience, and I want to apologize to you for the way you have been treated this morning. I 

thought this was a hearing and not a trial. I want you to take the 

5 minutes that I have and use it to say anything that you haven’t 

had an opportunity to say. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Thank you. I think that between my full testimony and my oral testimony and my response to the questions, 

that I hope is clear, that we have not, in this investigation, lost any 

email from the start of the investigation until now. 

I hope it is clear that by the end of this month we will have provided all of the Lois Lerner emails that we have; that those will 

number 67,000. 

It should be clear that in the period of Ms. Lerner’s hard-drive 

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It should be clear on the basis of the email track that Lois 

Lerner was not trying to destroy email; in fact, was working very 

hard and asked for extraordinary efforts to try to restore her 

emails at that time so that it doesn’t appear to be any attempt on 

her part as noted to rejoice over the loss of those emails. 

It should be clear that when we did provide this committee with 

on Monday preliminary information reporting, the net result of 

that was a press release erroneously leaping to conclusions that 

Nikole Flax’ emails had been lost along with others. It turns out 

on further investigation and we are continuing that investigation, 

that none of Nikole Flax’s emails appear to have been lost. 

We will provide this committee a full report on the other 

custodians as we complete that work. Thus far it has been clearly 

demonstrated that piecemealing out information about there is a 

possible problem simply results in press releases, and angry letters 

to me. 

So my position from the start and will continue to be, we will, 

as we have, continue to keep this committee fully informed of the 

facts as we find them. If there are situations, we will investigate 

those and give you all of the information about them. 

I did not come out of retirement to run an agency that did not 

create transparency, responsiveness to congressional inquiries, congressional letters, or otherwise. This is an important agency. It provides critical work for the government collecting 93 percent of the 

money the government uses to run, but more importantly, it touches virtually every American. And I think it is important for every 

American taxpayer to feel comfortable and confident that when 

they treat—deal with the IRS, they are going to be treated fairly 

no matter who they are; whether they are rich or poor, whether 

they are Republicans or Democrats, whoever they voted for in the 

last election. 

And to say that this is the most corrupt IRS in history ignores 

a lot of history, and seems to me, again, is a classic overreaction 

to a serious problem which we are dealing with seriously. And I 

would just like that to be our record. I am comfortable with it. I 

am confident about it, and I am willing to stand on that record in 

the 6 months that I have been the IRS Commissioner. 

Chairman CAMP. All right. Thank you. 

Mr. LEWIS. Thank you, Mr. Commissioner. 

I yield back. 

Chairman CAMP. I ask unanimous consent to place into the 

record a June 18th letter from Neal Eggleston, Counsel to the 

President, as well as a June 20th letter of this year from Alastair 

M. Fitzpayne, Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs at the Department of the Treasury. 

Without objection, so ordered. 

Mr. LEVIN. May I reserve my right to object? 

Chairman CAMP. Yes, you may reserve your right to object. 

Mr. LEVIN. And I will tell you why. I hope everybody will read 

the letter from Mr. Fitzpayne, which says—— 

Chairman CAMP. That is the purpose of placing it in the record. 

Mr. LEVIN. I just want to—I know. And I want to continue with 

my reservation. 

Chairman CAMP. The gentleman has reserved his objection—— 


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Mr. LEVIN. I want to tell you why. 

Chairman CAMP [continuing]. To letters from the administration. 

Mr. LEVIN. It says, ‘‘In response to your questions, IRS informed 

Treasury in 2014 that Ms. Lerner’s custodial email box appeared 

to contain very few emails prior to 2011. Treasury agreed with the 

IRS that it should inform Congress as soon as it was able to provide accurate and complete information, although Treasury ultimately deferred to the IRS on how to handle the matter.’’ I withdraw my—— 

Mr. KIND. Mr. Chairman, are copies of those letters being distributed? 

Chairman CAMP. We are making copies now. We just—the committee just received these pretty recently. So, yeah, copies will be 

made available to every member of the committee. 

So, without objection, so ordered. 

Mr. Ryan is recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. RYAN. This is unbelievable. The apology that ought to be 

given is to the American taxpayer, not to a government agency that 

is abusing its power. I am sitting here listening to this testimony, 

I just—I don’t believe it. That is your problem. Nobody believes 

you. 

Mr. LEVIN. Come on now. 

Mr. RYAN. The Internal Revenue Service comes to Congress a 

couple years ago and misleads us and says no targeting is occurring. Then it said it was a few rogue agents in Cincinnati. Then 

it also said it was also on progressives. All of those things have 

been proven untrue. This committee sent a criminal referral of possible criminal wrongdoing just a month ago to the Justice Department. We have heard nothing. You bury in a 27-page letter to the 

Senate asking for them to conclude the investigation that you have 

lost Lois Lerner’s emails during the time in question because of a 

hard drive crash. 

Monday, our investigators asked your agency whether any other 

hard drives crashed, and we learn that six other hard drives of the 

people we are investigating were involved. You didn’t tell us that. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. We told you on Monday. 

Mr. RYAN. On Monday. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. What did you do with the information? 

Mr. RYAN. Because we asked you. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Right. And what did you do with that information? 

Mr. RYAN. You told us on Monday because we asked you whether any other hard drives crashed. This is unbelievable. You told us 

in May you were going to give us all of Lois Lerner’s emails, and 

you learned in February that this crashed. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I did not learn in February it was a crash. And 

we told you on Monday—— 

Mr. RYAN. I am not asking you a question. I am making a statement. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I am sorry about that. My apologies. 

Mr. RYAN. You are the Internal Revenue Service. You can reach 

into the lives of hardworking taxpayers and with a phone call, an 

email, or a letter, you can turn their lives upside down. You ask 


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taxpayers to hang onto 7 years of their personal tax information in 

case they are ever audited, and you can’t keep 6 months’ worth of 

employee emails? And now that we are seeing this investigation, 

you don’t have the emails. Hard drives crashed. You learned about 

this months ago, you just told us, and we had to ask you on Monday. This is not being forthcoming. This is being misleading again. 

This is a pattern of abuse, a pattern of behavior that is not giving 

us any confidence that this agency is being impartial. I don’t believe you. This is incredible. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I have a long career. That is the first time anybody has ever said they do not believe me. 

Mr. RYAN. I don’t believe you. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That’s fine. We can have a disagreement. I am 

willing to stand on my record. I am willing to remind you that it 

was not buried in 27 pages. Most of that 27 pages is exhibits. When 

asked about the custodians, we advised you what—— 

Mr. RYAN. Being forthcoming. 

Mr. KOSKINEN [continuing]. Which we knew for 1 day. 

Mr. RYAN. Being forthcoming is to say—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I am sorry—— 

Mr. RYAN [continuing]. You know, investigators, Congress who 

is investigating this—— 

Mr. LEVIN. Will you let him answer the question? 

Mr. RYAN. I didn’t ask him a question. 

Mr. LEVIN. Yes, you did. 

Chairman CAMP. The gentleman—the gentleman from Wisconsin controls the time. 

Mr. RYAN. I control the time. 

Chairman CAMP. I realize that disrupting a hearing—— 

Mr. LEVIN. Now come on. 

Chairman CAMP [continuing]. Serves people. But the gentleman 

from Wisconsin—— 

Mr. RYAN. I am not yielding time. I control the time. 

Chairman CAMP. He has the time. 

Mr. RYAN. Here is what being forthcoming is. 

Chairman CAMP. Regular order. 

Mr. RYAN. If we are investigating criminal wrongdoing, targeting of people based on their political beliefs, and the emails in 

question are lost because of a hard drive crash that is apparently 

unrecoverable, which a lot of IT professionals will question, and 

you don’t tell us about it until we ask you about it, that is not 

being forthcoming. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. And that’s not true. 

Mr. RYAN. I yield back the balance of my time. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That is not true. 

Mr. RYAN. I yield back the balance of my time. 

Chairman CAMP. The gentleman has yielded back his time. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Good. Thank you. 

Chairman CAMP. Mr. Neal is recognized. 

Mr. NEAL. Well, I am going to let you answer Mr. Ryan’s question. Go ahead. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Right. Mr. Ryan tried to leave the impression 

that only by being asked did we reveal the information about the 

hard drive crash. 


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First of all, I reiterate the information about the hard drive crash 

is in the emails that you and your staff have had for some time. 

Secondly, we produced that public report telling you about the 

email loss on our own. It was not in response to a question. 

Third, we learned on Monday morning about the custodians. We 

were asked, our staff was asked on Monday afternoon. We told 

them all we knew, which was there a was an indication there had 

been a hard drive problem with six others. The next morning, this 

committee put out a release asserting, leaping to the conclusion 

that therefore emails had been lost, particularly Nikole Flax’s 

emails. It turns out, as we have continued to work and we have 

more work to do, that there is no evidence that any Nikole Flax 

email was lost. We are responding. What we are trying do, as the 

Treasury letter suggested, is as soon as we are able to give you a 

full picture of it, we are providing that. 

It is not in response to a question. That was a public report we 

provided you. We will continue to provide you documents. You have 

770,000 pages. You will have 67,000 Lois Lerner emails; 24,000 of 

Lois Lerner emails in the period when it crashed have not been 

lost, they will be produced to you. 

Chairman CAMP. Mr. Neal, on this point, may I ask you a question? May I ask a question here on your time, and I will give you 

some more time? There is a distinction, yes. The committee did 

know about the hard drive. But we did not know about the server. 

There is a distinction. We did not know about the server. And the 

server came in the carbon copy of the letter you sent to the Senate. 

The server means they are lost forever. A hard drive crash doesn’t 

necessarily mean that the emails are lost forever. So there is a significant distinction here that has not been made yet to date. 

So Mr. Neal, I will make sure you have more time. 

Mr. NEAL. Would you like to respond? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That is an important question, and one of the 

reasons that we did not immediately say we discovered a hard 

drive crash, because as you just noted, a hard drive crash does not 

mean that emails have been lost forever. And in fact, in the case 

of Lois Lerner, 24,000 of her emails were not lost. They have actually been found; they will be produced. You have 5,000 of them already, you will have 24,000 of them by the end of the month. So 

when a hard drive crashes, the emails do not necessarily disappear. 

Her email account, any emails in those accounts, which were the 

emails we could find in that period, were included and did not 

crash. 

Mr. NEAL. Thank you. 

Commissioner, I must tell you that based on what we have heard 

so far today, if you came in here and said you agreed with everything that the Republicans have suggested, then they would say, 

We don’t believe you. They have come to a conclusion, not based 

upon the facts, but upon what they might promote as a conspiracy. 

The only thing that is missing is Oliver Stone. But there is time 

for that because there is an election 5 months from now. So there 

will be plenty of opportunity for them to do this. 

Let me say something, having served on this committee for a 

long period of time. You have an individual here today who has a 

distinguished career, who has served in Republican and Democratic 


joloto on DSKB35BYQ1 with HEARING
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administrations, coupled with the fact he took an oath today. Unless those here didn’t hear him take the oath or witness him taking 

the oath, for him to take the oath and then to have people suggest 

to him, we don’t believe you, that is not the way this committee has 

functioned in the past. And it ought not to be the way we function 

going forward. 

Now, just a couple of quick questions, and then I want to offer 

something to you. The tax investigator general has said there 

wasn’t a cover up. Is that correct? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That is correct. 

Mr. NEAL. There was not a conspiracy based on that assertion 

that he has made? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That is my understanding. 

Mr. NEAL. That’s your understanding. And to the moment, there 

is no smoking gun linking the administration to Lois Lerner. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That’s also my understanding. 

Mr. NEAL. Now, I would hope that at some point, this committee 

might spend a hearing, maybe a morning talking about the success 

that you have had with offshoring accounts for individual taxpayers. The number is pretty stunning in what you have begun to 

collect from those who have voluntarily complied in Switzerland 

and in other tax havens. And it is a story that I would hope that 

we would have an opportunity to talk about. 

Mr. Camp is correct when he says the tax system works on the 

basis of people believing that there is equity in it for all and that 

everybody carries their burden. And spending some time on 

offshoring and spending some time on compliance might be equally 

good for a hearing. But I know it doesn’t fit with the determination 

that was made this morning for the purpose of this hearing. 

Thank you, Commissioner. 

Chairman CAMP. All right. 

Mr. Nunes is recognized. 

Mr. NUNES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. Commissioner, in September 2010, a letter from Chairman 

Baucus asking for an investigation of apolitical 501(c)(4) groups, 

that would have went to Mrs. Lerner, correct? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. It would have gone to her? I don’t know where 

it would have gone. I was not there. 

Mr. NUNES. But if it went to her, assuming it did, like it should 

have, she would have responded. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. She or the agency. Either she or the agency 

would respond to that. I haven’t seen the letter. I don’t know what 

the response would have been. 

Mr. NUNES. Would we have that email. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Which email? 

Mr. NUNES. Would we have the response? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. The response I assume would not have been by 

email. 

Mr. NUNES. There would be a letter, I assume—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. There would be a letter. 

Mr. NUNES [continuing]. Back to a Senator who chairs the Finance Committee. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. If a letter comes in the from the Senator, there 

should be a response back. 


joloto on DSKB35BYQ1 with HEARING
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Mr. NUNES. Then there was in October of 2010, Senator Durbin 

wrote Commissioner Shulman urging him to investigate conservative groups, specifically Crossroads GPS. That letter would have 

likely been sent to Ms. Lerner. Did Ms. Lerner ever write Senator 

Durbin or his staff back? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I have no idea. 

Mr. NUNES. If she did, would we have any of the emails associated with it? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. If she wrote back or the agency wrote back, 

there would be a hard copy. There would be a letter in the file as 

to what it said. 

Mr. NUNES. And during the period before the crash, liberal 

leaning groups, Democracy 21, repeatedly wrote the IRS asking for 

an investigation of conservative leaning groups. Did Lois Lerner 

ever write them back? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I don’t know whether she wrote them back or 

not. 

Mr. NUNES. Would you have a copy of those letters? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. You would have a copy of those letters. 

Mr. NUNES. Could we get those letters? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. If we have those letters, they probably have already been produced. 

Mr. NUNES. In June 2011, Chairman Camp sent a letter to the 

IRS asking about abuses of the gift tax targeting. And just so you 

know, we do have that letter. We did receive a response. So the 

point here is that there were 83 specific employees that we asked 

for all of their emails on. You are aware of that, right? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I am aware of that. You asked for all the 

emails. We worked with the investigators to select the 83 that 

seemed to be most likely to be involved, and to select a range of 

search terms that would actually produce the emails that would be 

relevant to the investigation. 

Mr. NUNES. But that was only emails between the 83. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No, that’s any emails. 

Mr. NUNES. For example, if Lois Lerner sent an email to Secretary Lew—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That would be in those emails searched for. 

There was no limitation that they would only be emails within the 

agency. The search terms were any emails to anyone. It is just the 

83 were the email accounts that were searched to see if anybody 

of the 83 wrote to anybody else about any of those search terms, 

those emails would be produced. 

Mr. NUNES. But Secretary Lew is not one of the 83. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No. 

Mr. NUNES. You are telling me if there was an email—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. If there was an email from any of the 83 to Secretary Lew, that email would be in their email box and would have 

been found and produced. The limitation was not the communications back and forth among the 83. It was the 83 custodians, as 

they are called, their emails, any email that in the time frame met 

any of the search terms that were agreed to, all of those emails 

were produced whether they were to someone within the 83, outside the 83 in the agency, or outside the agency. 


joloto on DSKB35BYQ1 with HEARING
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Mr. NUNES. But do you understand Mr. Ryan’s point when the 

letter you sent to the Senate last week on Friday, which is exactly 

what had happened when Lois Lerner planted the question in the 

audience way back? I mean, it just shows a pattern of abuse and 

a pattern of dumping things on Fridays. And then specifically—I 

am not trying to get into a tit for tat with you here. Okay? I am 

just saying why it is not believable is because you only talked 

about Lois Lerner’s hard drive, which is one of the 83, but there 

were six additional folks in that 83 that have disappeared, too, and 

you didn’t tell us about it on Friday. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Right. Can I explain? 

Mr. NUNES. Sure. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Explain. We originally, as I said, hoped to complete the production of all Lois Lerner emails, complete the investigation, which had just started, of the other 82 and provide a complete report. Senate Finance Committee indicated that they were 

nearing conclusion—closure on their report, and they wanted an 

update on our letter in mid-March to this committee and Finance 

that we had found—that we had produced all the relevant emails 

to the IG investigation. We provided that letter. They also asked 

for an update on all of our production. And they asked for it no 

later than last Friday. The reason it was produced Friday rather 

than the end of this month was in response to a request from Finance. At the time we produced that report on Friday, we had no 

information about the other custodians that I had asked people to 

review. That information was provided to our IT person—people on 

Monday morning, who happened to then be briefing your staff 

Monday afternoon. I am under a lot of heat from the Senate—— 

Chairman CAMP. Time has expired. 

Mr. KOSKINEN.—because I didn’t know on Monday, and I didn’t 

tell them on Monday because I didn’t know. It was not included in 

the Friday report produced in response to a Finance Committee request, because when that report was prepared no one in the agency 

knew which, if any, of the other 82 custodians were involved. 

Chairman CAMP. Time has expired. 

Mr. Becerra. 

Mr. BECERRA. Commissioner, thank you for being here. And let 

me add my regrets to you that this hearing has been conducted as 

less as a hearing than it has been as an inquisition. And you deserve better. You certainly are obligated to give us truthful answers. And we appreciate that you are trying to. Let me suggest 

to you one thing. You have a right to try to respond to any question. If you find that you are being badgered or not given an opportunity to respond, just take a breath and then try to get your answer out. If you are not given that opportunity, then recognize 

that, again, this is maybe not a hearing, but an inquisition. But 

you have a right to make sure the record reflects what you under 

oath would like to say. 

Some want to confuse the real issue that’s been raised by this 

investigation. Let me ask you a question. In this added scrutiny 

that IRS was giving to the so-called social welfare organizations, is 

there evidence that shows that any number of different types of organizations other than just far right or conservative organizations 

were being scrutinized? 


joloto on DSKB35BYQ1 with HEARING
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Mr. KOSKINEN. There is evidence that organizations across the 

spectrum were reviewed. The bulk of the applications were from 

conservative groups, so the bulk of the reviews were of conservative 

groups. 

Mr. BECERRA. But it wasn’t just of conservative groups. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That is correct. 

Mr. BECERRA. Okay. So some would like to portray this as just 

targeting or an attack on conservative groups. But the evidence, 

which has been revealed to everyone, including members in this 

committee, is otherwise. I think we are watching how people are 

trying to confuse the issue here. This investigation should truly be 

about what is really wrong with the system. And that is that today 

in America, these so-called social welfare organizations, these notfor-profit organizations that get special tax breaks that ordinary 

Americans don’t get, they pay less in taxes than an organization 

that doesn’t have that tax status as a 501(c)(4), they spent in the 

last election cycle, 2012, more money as social welfare organizations than the two political parties combined; $256 million spent by 

so-called social welfare organizations to conduct political campaigns. While the two parties, which are there to conduct political 

campaigns, spent less than the $256 million that these social welfare organizations spent. 

I hope, at some point, Commissioner, we will have a chance to 

get into that, because my understanding is that we are seeing now 

the seeds of this dark money that’s being spent. My understanding 

is there is an investigation by the State prosecutors in the State 

of Wisconsin of the Wisconsin Governor for perhaps coordinating illegally campaign activities in ways that might violate the law. 

What we are finding is that fewer and fewer of these organizations 

that are applying for this tax-exempt status that gives them special 

tax treatment are doing social welfare. They are doing nothing 

more than campaigning. Is that something that the IRS is concerned about, that what was to be a tax provision and tax status 

reserved for organizations that want to do social welfare is being 

used to conduct campaign activity? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Our concern at this point is to try, as I have 

testified on numerous occasions, to take a review of the regulations 

governing all (c) organizations and determine, can we provide clarity as to what’s allowable activity, the amount of it that you can 

engage in without jeopardizing your tax exemption, and to which 

organizations should it apply. As you know, we have had over 

150,000 comments on that draft regulation. We announced that 

sometime probably into early next year, we will review and repropose, ask for more comments, have a public hearing. I do think it 

is important—we are not in the political business. I think what is 

important is to provide clarity. Right now, it is an unclear standard. It is hard for people running those organizations to know 

what’s allowable and not allowable. They should not operate those 

organizations worried that somebody’s going to say the facts and 

circumstances changed, and now you are not eligible. So that our 

goal is to have, as I have said, a rule that’s fair to everyone, clear, 

and easy to administer. And we are going to try to do that. 


joloto on DSKB35BYQ1 with HEARING
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Mr. BECERRA. Final question. You are under oath. To your 

knowledge, are there any documents or requests for information 

that you have not responded to completely? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. There are—we are responding as quickly as we 

can. We have far flung requests for documents that we have not 

been able to respond to now. There is no document request or information request that we are not going to respond to as quickly as 

we can. We will provide anything the committee would like. 

Chairman CAMP. The time has expired. 

Mr. Tiberi is recognized. 

Mr. TIBERI. Commissioner, you have a really important job. A 

lot of Americans fear the IRS. Very important agency that has 

struggled to have a leader with any consistency over the last several years. And this Congress and this committee have heard from 

a lot of different leaders who come and go. And it is been quite 

frustrating for us and many of our constituents regarding—and I 

won’t rehash the concern. But I think every member of this committee ought to do something this weekend and maybe Monday. Go 

talk to your case worker who deals with the IRS for your constituents. Get an earful from them. And maybe we wouldn’t be apologizing to the IRS. 

Let me tell you a story, sir. Small business man in my district 

paid his taxes on time forever. Forever. He had an automatic payment set up in fact with his bank to pay the IRS, probably like you 

have done as a business man in the past. October of last year, he 

found out one day—actually, the day that his payment was due to 

the IRS—that his account had been hacked. No fault of his own. 

Fraud. Fraud. He did what any law-abiding citizen would do. He 

worked with the bank to close the account. The IRS had already 

accessed the account, but it had already been closed, and he knew 

that. He called the IRS and said, Hey, my account had been 

hacked. A payment was made. It was made incorrectly because 

they closed the account, so the payment is going to bounce. I don’t 

want to get penalized. I don’t want interest. What do I do? Well, 

thank you for letting us know. Send us a letter. Get us a check immediately. And all will be good. 

It is the middle of June, sir. He is being charged penalty and interest because of that fraudulent payment. No fault of his own. He 

fears the IRS. That is just one case. That is one case, ladies and 

gentlemen. 

And when these constituents have watched, long before you got 

to the IRS, by the way, long before you got there, have seen the 

IRS continually delay when there is no delay on their part if the 

IRS wants information. If they say, well, my document got destroyed, sorry, buddy, not an excuse. There seems to be two sets 

of rules, sir. And the frustration that we have is, quite frankly, everybody knows that this has going on for years, for 3 years. 

And so if the President would have asked me to go over and be 

commissioner of the IRS, and I found out in May, April, March, 

February, what you found out, rather than bury it in a letter on 

page 15, here is what I would have done: Just a suggestion. Because of the lack of confidence the American people and this committee have because of how our constituents are treated differently 

than how the IRS leadership treats America, is Mr. Camp, Mr. 


joloto on DSKB35BYQ1 with HEARING
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Levin, this just—I just found out this happened. Wouldn’t cost a 

cent. Just pick up the phone. The President has a phone. You probably have a phone. Pick up the phone, call Mr. Wyden and say 

something very bad just happened. Don’t know why. I don’t think 

it is a coverup. I don’t think it is criminal. But because of the past 

and the lack of transparency in the past and because we are a really important agency that the American people need to have confidence in and Congress needs to have confidence in, I just wanted 

you to be aware of this. And we are going to continue to try to get 

to the bottom of this. When you don’t do that, for what reasons— 

I understand completely what you are saying, don’t necessarily 

agree with, but I understand where you are coming from, but when 

we find it buried in a letter, and then on Monday, because we 

asked the question, not because you provided the information, because we asked the right question, and there are probably a lot of 

questions that we haven’t figured out are the right questions yet, 

we get the right answer, there is a feeling here that, oh, my gosh, 

the IRS has no credibility. And it doesn’t need to be that way. 

This isn’t about Republicans and Democrats. This is about our 

constituents, ladies and gentlemen. Talk to your IRS case worker. 

I can give you 12 more. I did IRS case work. Americans fear the 

IRS. And now, unfortunately, with a pattern of delay and disrespect and deceit, in many cases—not from you, sir—there is just 

no credibility. This is not good for our country. And my hope is that 

you can clean this up. 

But I got to tell you I don’t even have a question for you. This 

is amazingly awful. This is absolutely awful. This is not partisan. 

Just talk to your case workers, guys. This is not partisan. This is 

just Americans frustrated with an arrogance of an agency that is 

above the law in their opinion. 

I yield back. 

Chairman CAMP. Thank you. 

Mr. Doggett is recognized. 

Mr. DOGGETT. Well, the first thing I did in preparing for today’s hearing was to talk with my case workers, our constituent 

service representatives, as we call them, in Austin and San Antonio. And what I found, Commissioner, is that when 250 IRS employees spend over 120,000 hours and almost $20 million on responding to Congress, those employees are not able to respond to 

their ordinary duties. I found, for example, that as far as nonprofit 

community service organizations, that the Austin African American 

Cultural Center, that a small town area community foundation 

that wanted to raise money in that small town for the first time 

to support community activities, that a neighborhood community 

association in San Antonio, that the Unitarian Universalist Justice 

Ministry, that a video service that covers community organizations 

in San Antonio and tries to spread the word about their activities, 

all of them had waited months and, in some cases, over a year to 

try to get approval of their application because it would appear to 

me your folks are so busy responding to one claim after another, 

you have no additional resources, you are not able to respond to the 

job that the law asked you to do. 

I believe that there has been a long-term commitment to hamstring, to encumber, to underfund the Internal Revenue Service 


joloto on DSKB35BYQ1 with HEARING
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and discredit it and the whole concept of progressive taxation in 

this country. 

Now, let me ask you, as to the seriousness of this investigation, 

sir, have you ever been in Benghazi? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No. 

Mr. DOGGETT. Do you know if you or Ms. Lerner have ever had 

any responsibility for anything having to do with Benghazi and our 

Embassy there? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No. 

Mr. DOGGETT. How about Area 51 out in Roswell, New Mexico, 

where all those space aliens allegedly came? Have you ever had 

any responsibility for that? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No. 

Mr. DOGGETT. Have you ever had custody of the President’s 

birth certificate? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No. 

Mr. DOGGETT. Well, Commissioner, I believe one of the mistakes that you have made in dealing with the committee today is 

that you did assume professionally that this was a serious inquiry. 

I believe it is an endless conspiracy theory that’s involved here that 

is being exploited solely for political purposes. 

I don’t approve of Ms. Lerner. I don’t approve of the way the IRS 

handled all these matters. 

But I think there is a much larger coverup issue here. And it is 

the desire of our Republican colleagues to cover up these purported 

social welfare organizations that don’t want to disclose the secret 

corporate campaign contributions that they rely on to pollute our 

democracy. 

It is not surprising to me that, without a letter from a Member 

of Congress, that the Internal Revenue Service would have at least 

questioned why one organization headed by Karl Rove of Texas, 

Crossroads GPS, was spending $71 million in election cycle 2012. 

My concern is that it doesn’t appear from the public record that 

there has been a determination as to whether that was a legitimate 

social welfare organization or not. 

As my colleague Mr. Becerra indicated, we know from today’s papers an elaborate chart, that another of these social welfare organizations headed by Mr. Rove, called Citizens for a Strong America, 

and we are sure all for that, but that that organization apparently 

was involved in polluting the political process in the State of Wisconsin. 

I believe that this is a serious matter. The use of corporate secret 

money is a problem enough. But the determination to have that 

money be taxpayer-subsidized in social welfare organizations, in 

some cases headed by individuals who never had any interest in social welfare until they can claim it for themselves to pollute our democracy, that that is a serious problem. 

I am pleased you are going to be coming forward with anything 

else that you can find. Because though this is not a serious investigation, but the endless pursuit, the obsession with conspiracy and 

conspiracies, we do need to have every bit of information, every 

shred of information that you can find, even though the people I 

talk about in Texas who have legitimate issues before the IRS are 

collateral damage in the process. But then I guess Mr. Rove and 


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some of his colleagues never much cared about collateral damage 

in other contexts anyway. 

I yield back. 

Chairman CAMP. Mr. Reichert is recognized. 

Mr. REICHERT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. Koskinen, I believe that you are an honest man and that you 

want to do the right thing and that you took this job to improve 

the IRS and serve the American people. And so I just have a few 

questions. I used to be—I was a cop for 33 years. So I just want 

to kind of go through some questions and try to understand this 

thing, because it is pretty confusing I think to the American people. 

Wouldn’t you agree with that? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. It is a confusing—technology is confusing to all 

of us. 

Mr. REICHERT. Yes. Okay. Well, so there is an IG investigation 

currently ongoing. Right? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. There are two IG investigations, one on the response to the first IG report and another IG investigation going on 

into in fact the hard drive crash of Lois Lerner. 

Mr. REICHERT. And you are fully cooperating with the IG’s office? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. We have always fully cooperated. I once chaired 

the intergovernmental agency of coordination of all inspectors general. I am a big supporter. 

Mr. REICHERT. All right. And you provided them with all the 

information they asked for in the process of their investigation? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Yes. 

Mr. REICHERT. All the requests. And you have kept them updated as much as you can on all the information that’s developed 

on this investigation? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. As they investigate, we have provided all the 

documents they want. 

Mr. REICHERT. So I am a little confused today when I learn 

that the IG’s office called our office here, our staff people here on 

the Ways and Means Committee and said that they didn’t learn 

about the hard drive issue until the Ways and Means Committee 

put out their press release. How could that happen? The IG is conducting an investigation, and they have no idea there is hard drive 

issues or lost emails. Can you answer that question? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. The investigation they were doing is the investigation of the response to their report. They have started an investigation on the issues regarding the hard drive. They were not 

doing an investigation of that. 

Mr. REICHERT. But you just said you fully cooperated and provided them with all the information. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I meet with the IG once a month. 

Mr. REICHERT. They have to learn, Mr. Koskinen, they have to 

learn through a press release from the Ways and Means Committee of the United States Congress, they have to learn from that 

that there is an issue that I would think as an old cop again, I 

would need to know. If I was conducting that investigation, and 

you were a part of that, and you were helping me and assisting me 

in that investigation, does that not make sense to you that that 

would be information that you would provide to the IG’s office? 


joloto on DSKB35BYQ1 with HEARING
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Mr. KOSKINEN. We are providing—— 

Mr. REICHERT. Yes or no. Yes or no because my time is limited. 

Would that not be information that you would provide to the IG’s 

office? I just need a yes or no. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Yes. And we have provided it, and we will continue to provide information to them. 

Mr. REICHERT. I think that’s important. But you didn’t provide 

it to them because they learned it in a press release. That’s not correct. I think you want to be honest, but there have been some mistakes made, and I can understand that. You know, so let’s just go 

through this, you know, very quickly. So we have, you know, a flagging of the Tea Party applications. People have gone over kind of 

the timeline here. Lois Lerner sends her emails to IRS employees. 

Cincy should probably not have these cases. Tea Party matter is 

very dangerous. We begin our investigation. We are told that any 

potential targeting was conducted by rogue employees in Ohio. We 

request all of Lois Lerner’s emails. The internal review. Then we 

find out that emails are destroyed. Now we find out the hard drive 

is destroyed. Mr. Koskinen, the American people don’t believe this. 

They can’t—I can’t—if you had an employee under investigation for 

some violation of your policy internally, you wouldn’t accept, oh, 

Mr. Koskinen, Mr. Supervisor, Madam Supervisor, I lost my 

emails. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I would accept—— 

Mr. REICHERT. My hard drive. It blew up. So would you stop 

your investigation? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No, I would accept—if I found contemporaneous—— 

Mr. REICHERT. What happened if they would say, look, I have 

destroyed—I have destroyed my hard drive? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. If I found contemporary—— 

Mr. REICHERT. What would you do, sir? What would you do, 

sir. What would you do, sir? 

My time, thank you, Mr. Levin. 

Chairman CAMP. Regular order. Regular order. 

Mr. REICHERT. What would you do, sir, if an employee came to 

you and said my hard drive has—I destroyed it? I destroyed my 

hard drive? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. If I found, investigated and found contemporaneous information from 3 years earlier that he in fact had worked 

very hard to restore his hard drive, he had got the best experts 

available to try to reconstitute the email and that had failed, I 

would tend to believe him. 

Mr. REICHERT. The other six hard drives, they destroyed, too? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. At this point, we are still investigating the 

other hard drives. As I noted, on one of them—actually, one of the 

ones on Monday turned out to have a failure in February of this 

year, which is outside the timeline. Ms. Flax’s hard drive appears 

not to have caused the loss of a single email. Hard drive crashes 

alone do not cause email to be destroyed. We don’t know that information. We will get it to you when we find it. 

Chairman CAMP. Time has expired, Mr. Koskinen. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. All right. 

Chairman CAMP. And now Mr. Thompson. 


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Mr. THOMPSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. Commissioner, thank you very much for being here. I, too, 

want to thank you for your public service and your distinguished 

career. And I don’t want to apologize to the IRS, but I do want to 

apologize to you as a professional in the way that you have been 

treated today. You know, if you could cut through a lot of the political theater that we see taking place on this dais today, I think 

there is actually some things that we can all from both sides of the 

aisle agree to. I think we are all pretty upset if in fact there was 

any inappropriate behavior on the part of the IRS. And I think 

most of us in previous hearings have expressed that. I don’t care 

if you are a Democrat—actually, I do care if you are a Democrat 

or a Republican. But it doesn’t matter if you are a Democrat or you 

are a Republican, a conservative or a liberal, you should receive 

equal and transparent treatment from the IRS. And if there is any 

targeting done, it was absolutely inexcusable. I think we are all at 

the least disappointed that Ms. Lerner took the Fifth. I think that 

helped create a lot of the political nonsense that we are seeing 

playing out today. I wish that would have gone smoother and we 

could have gotten to the bottom of some of these problems from the 

start. And I certainly hope that we all agree that given all of these 

hearings that we are having, a race to have our hearing before the 

other committee has theirs, and all the effort that’s gone into this, 

it has really been a distraction from us being able to address the 

problems, a lot of the problems that are important to the American 

people; everything from tax reform to immigration reform, highway 

repair, a transportation bill. If we could just take a little bit of this 

time, maybe we could get some of the issues that would help put 

America back to work dealt with. 

And I think all of us experienced the same situation as my friend 

from Ohio. We all can tell stories about constituent problems with 

not just the IRS but with anything. I will take the opportunity, I 

will take the lead from my friend from Ohio and the opportunity, 

given that you are here, to tell you I personally have been trying 

for weeks to get an appointment in my district with the IRS over 

a constituent matter that—a small business man in my district has 

been dealing with for a couple of years. And it is all based on a 

bill that the chairman and I co-authored and had signed into law 

dealing with conservation easements. So if you have any influence 

on your California office, please ask them to return my call. I 

would like to deal with that. But the thing that I found that has 

really pricked my interest today, in addition to getting this thing 

cleaned up and done with, is the issue of the lost and misplaced, 

and not knowing where they are or that the process for dealing 

with them is hard drives. A number of years ago, because of legislation that I carried dealing with electronic waste, we found out, 

not through our own resources, through press reports, that a number of hard drives from our intelligence community and from the 

Department of Defense were found in Third World countries in disposal sites. And that was a terrible breach of national security and 

caused me to amend our intelligence bill. And probably everybody 

here who was there then voted for that amendment and that bill. 

And we figured out how to deal with that in the intelligence community. But it sounds like we have the same security problem with 


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some of the hardware and software in your agency. And I would 

like to know if you think that’s something that we should try and 

collaborate on to make sure that we can protect the records of the 

public as they are stored in your equipment. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No, it is an important issue, which is why when 

there is a hard drive that no longer is usable, it goes to a recycler 

and is destroyed rather than put in a waste dump or sent out 

somewhere else. 

Mr. THOMPSON. Well, I would be happy to share with you the 

intel approach we took if you think that might help. In the remainder of my time, I know you had some things you were trying to say 

to the last—my last colleague who spoke to you. I would put my 

remaining time to you to answer any of those questions. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Thank you. I appreciate that. 

I think the important thing to note is I would encourage everybody to talk to their case workers and to let us know if there are 

issues. I have spent a significant amount of time visiting the 25 

largest IRS offices across the country, encouraging—I have met 

with over 10,000 employees—encouraging frontline employees, who 

often know best what is going on, to let me know if there is an 

issue, to give us their best insights and advice and suggestions for 

how to improve our operations. I am particularly concerned, and we 

are working on the backlog in the 501(c)(3) organizations. And we 

are doing our best to work that backlog down so that your constituents actually get an appropriate and prompt answer to their applications. 

Chairman CAMP. All right. Time has expired. 

Dr. Boustany. 

Mr. BOUSTANY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Commissioner, good to see you. I have to tell you I was damned 

angry on Friday when we got word about what happened with Lois 

Lerner’s hard drive and all the news that’s broken since then on 

this. And I am even angrier today about this. And it is interesting, 

you know, Chairman Camp and I sent a letter to Secretary Lew on 

Monday, and after months of stonewalling about documents, we finally got 2,500 documents 30 minutes before this committee convened its hearing. And it is just amazing that the White House or 

the Treasury can respond that quickly when spurred to do so, and 

we are still waiting for a lot of this information from your agency. 

But I want to explore some questions with regard to Nikole Flax. 

She had two computers, correct? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Correct. 

Mr. BOUSTANY. She had one desktop and a laptop, is that 

right? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Yes. 

Mr. BOUSTANY. Yes. Okay. Which hard drive failed? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I have been advised it was her laptop that 

failed, not her office computer. 

Mr. BOUSTANY. Okay. And so how do you know where she has 

archived—or do you know where she has archived the key documents from the time frame that we are interested in? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Time frame you are interested in, everyone archives their documents on their hard drive in the office because 


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that’s where most of the work is done and they want to be retrievable. 

Mr. BOUSTANY. So can you attest that all relevant emails and 

documents, memos from Nikole Flax related to targeting are 

produceable? You have these? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I can attest at this point I am advised there is 

no evidence that any email was lost by Nikole Flax. I have not personally talked to her. And again, this is all information that’s being 

developed as we talk. 

Mr. BOUSTANY. Email, memos, all documents? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. My understanding is no email of hers has been 

lost as a result of her hard drive crash. 

Mr. BOUSTANY. Okay. And where is the laptop now which supposedly has hard drive problems? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I don’t know. As I said—— 

Mr. BOUSTANY. You don’t know. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. We just got the list on Monday ourselves. We 

have been pursuing this. And we will in fact give you a full report 

on all the custodians, now seven; the eighth one is one that actually failed this year, and it doesn’t count. 

Mr. BOUSTANY. So we don’t know where those hard drives are 

right now. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. We don’t know where those are. We will give 

you a full update on all of that. 

Mr. BOUSTANY. It is unbelievable to me that you don’t have 

that information. It’s been a week since the information was made 

public to us. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. The information was made public by you. We 

advised you in committee on Monday that this is all we had was 

the names. We are actually working through a review to find out 

what’s the status of those, how many emails were lost. We will find 

out and we will know where the hard drives are. Many times you 

reconstitute the hard drive and it continues to function. We will 

give you that information when we have it. Part of the issue, as 

I said earlier, with providing partial information is then we get immediately asked, well, what is the answer to this, and we don’t 

know the answer—— 

Mr. BOUSTANY. So we can expect this information in a timely 

manner. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. In a timely manner, we will get you all of the 

information we are able to discover. 

Mr. BOUSTANY. When was Lois Lerner’s hard drive recycled 

and made irretrievable? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. All I know is she was advised, as I noted, in 

the summer of 2011 that the Criminal Investigation Division had 

been unable to retrieve any emails off her hard drive, and it was 

recycled. I will get you the date, to the extent we have it, of 

when—— 

Mr. BOUSTANY. Get us that precise date. But I am really, really disturbed that it took this long for the committee to find out this 

information. Buried in the letter that we received on Friday. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. As I noted, there are emails that actually—as 

I say, we have had a good close working relationship with your 

staff—there are emails last fall in the productions that referenced 


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her hard drive crash that no one was paying any attention to because they were looking at all of the relevant information. As we 

proceeded through, it was not until into April that we understood 

there was a crash. And it was not until mid-May that we could actually bound the issue and determine how many emails were available and how many were not. 

Mr. BOUSTANY. But why wasn’t this committee notified before 

a decision was made to completely recycle her hard drive? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. The committee was not notified because that 

decision would have been made 3 years ago. That is not a decision—none of this had anything to do with the investigation. It 

was—— 

Mr. BOUSTANY. Well, I would submit it does have to do with 

the investigation, because we are trying to get necessary information. I know you were not there at the time. But I just thought 

maybe in your investigation of what’s going on, you might be able 

to shed some light as to why we were not notified. It disturbs me 

that this decision was made internally without any kind of outside 

consultation when this committee was vigorously pursuing information regarding this targeting scandal. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I would like to make the record very clear, the 

decision about that hard drive was made 3 years ago. There has 

been no decision made since this investigation started, and certainly since I started, to have anything destroyed. Every email, 

every hard drive that people are using now is safe. Lois Lerner’s 

hard drive after the crash is now in the possession of the IG. 

Mr. BOUSTANY. I just want to make it very clear that any decisions that are made, we need to be notified. This committee needs 

to be notified prior to any decisions made about the disposition of 

those hard drives. 

Chairman CAMP. All right. Thank you. Time has expired. 

We will be going two to one. 

Mr. Roskam is recognized. 

Mr. ROSKAM. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Commissioner, I am going to make an observation. It will sound 

condescending, and I don’t mean it be to be condescending. So go 

really deep into the meaning of what I am communicating. Growing up, my father would always tell me, Peter, make good choices. 

And we kind of have a running joke, one of my kids go out the door 

in the morning, or particularly in the evening, make good choices. 

And so I think you have made a bad choice. And it’s not a bad 

choice based on invective or bad motivation. I think the administration came to you singularly as a person, as a white knight, as 

someone with a sterling reputation, someone who has had experience turning around bad organizations. And I think the administration is trading on your reputation. 

So I think you have made a bad choice. Now you are in it now. 

But I think the decision to accept this responsibility as the IRS 

Commissioner and defending this administration was a bad choice. 

And I will make a prediction. I will make a prediction that in several months or in a year, you are not the Commissioner of the IRS 

anymore and that they will go out to someone else. Because now 

you are the third person in this. I don’t ask you to respond to that. 

But it is an observation. And I mean no condescension in it. 


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So here is the point. You are being characterized today by the 

other side as the victim. I mean, the IRS as a victim is so richly 

ironic, you can hardly believe it. So you are not a victim today. The 

IRS is not a victim today. And here is the fundamental problem. 

Chairman Camp sent a letter on this whole issue, and then 10 days 

later—so think about the duration of 10 days. Ten days is the ability to panic at the IRS, reflect, plan, talk, and execute. And there 

was a crash 10 days after the chairman’s letter. Now, I have got 

a slide. That’s a fire. And inside that fire is a hard drive. I have 

got another slide. That’s the hard drive after it was burned. And 

you know what, Commissioner? You know what was recoverable 

from that? One hundred percent of the data. So the notion that a 

hard drive or a server in the midst of this entire situation has been 

lost into oblivion is a case that even a white knight can’t make. 

I yield back. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Mr. Chairman, can I make a comment? 

Chairman CAMP. He has yielded back his time. You may seek 

time from the other side—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. All right. 

Chairman CAMP [continuing]. Because it is now Mr. 

Blumenauer’s time. 

Ms. SA ́ NCHEZ. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to allow 

the witness some time to respond to the allegation that Lois 

Lerner’s drive was thrown into a fire and 100 percent of it was recoverable, because it’s ridiculous. 

Chairman CAMP. There is not a question pending for the witness. Mr. Roskam made a statement. I object myself to that. 

Mr. Blumenauer, you are recognized and you may use your time 

as you see fit. 

Mr. BLUMENAUER. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. 

And I will try and be brief and turn a couple of those minutes 

over to you. 

First of all, thank you for appearing. Mr. Roskam said that you 

are not going to be doing this forever. I am surprised anybody 

takes this job based on the treatment that has been accorded to 

people who had better things to do with their lives, had credible 

careers, and who stepped into difficult circumstances. Thank you. 

I appreciate it. I appreciate the fact that you are managing, or attempting to, 90,000 employees. You have a budget almost $11 billion. And I appreciate that you are doing this with a workforce, 

since I have been in Congress, that has shrunk 25,000 employees, 

10,000 I think in the last 4 years. That the budget, if this Congress 

in its wisdom, my Republican colleagues are cutting your budget. 

The training budget I think went from $172 million to $22 million 

for a Tax Code that we consistently make more complex. And oftentimes, we don’t get our job done in time so that your employees can 

do their job. And then somehow we are pillorying you. 

And some of this does sound condescending I will say, or not allowing you to answer questions, for a situation that Congress has 

made worse and has systematically assaulted the IRS in its capacity to function. What did we do in the government shutdown? What 

business furloughs its accounts receivable department? Not one 

that stays in business very long. Not one that has the capacity to 

deal with layers and layers of complexity and a vast system where 


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people pound away on the IRS and the people who work there. I 

am amazed that anybody takes those jobs, from you on down. And 

I appreciate they do. You know, it is a certain irony it is now the 

dicta of the Republican Party to assault the IRS at every turn and 

undercut its ability to function. Gee, they were Republican Presidents, starting with Lincoln and Taft and Roosevelt, that promoted 

the income tax, which doesn’t collect itself. 

I appreciate the hard work. I appreciate being able to tease out 

this. I appreciate my friend Mr. Doggett’s reference to all manner 

of things that are being laid at your doorstep. I hope before we get 

through this budget process, we take a hard look at what this critical agency needs to function, like training, like people on the job. 

Not have budget cuts that we are told by the tax advocate a budget 

cut of $1 costs the Federal Government $7. And undercutting enforcement, which every dollar is over $250 that’s returned to the 

taxpayers for veterans’ services, for environmental protection, for 

defense. I am sorry, I am taking more time than I wanted. I would 

like to turn to you to give you an unfettered minute or two if there 

is something that you would like to say. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Thank you very much. 

Mr. BLUMENAUER. And I will just conclude with my thanks for 

your being here. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. With regard to bad choices, I am sorry the Congressman has left, I have noted that when people ask why I took 

this job that perhaps I need counseling to make decisions going forward. 

But I think if there is one issue I would like to have come out 

of this hearing, we have 90,000 dedicated employees that I have 

said I have talked to and listened to 10,000 of them. There is one 

point I want to come out of this, is I want to totally refute the suggestion that sometime in the next 6 to 12 months, I am going to 

fade away. I am firmly committed that I will serve the remaining 

3 and a half years of my term come whatever it may be. And I 

think it is important for those employees, dedicated as they are to 

the mission of this agency, to have confidence that their leader, the 

Commissioner of the IRS, is not going to cut and run, is not going 

to decide it was a bad choice to take this job, is delighted to be 

working with them, and that I look forward to the next 3 and a 

half years of my term doing that. 

I would also like to note the reference, again, that somehow it’s 

unbelievable we lost the hard drive now is unbelievable because it 

was not lost now, it was not destroyed now. That was a decision 

made 3 years ago, before any of these investigations started. There 

should be no implication that anything has been destroyed or tampered with since this investigation started and certainly since I became Commissioner. 

Chairman CAMP. Time has expired. 

Mr. GERLACH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Commissioner, on numerous occasions during your testimony 

here this morning, as well as on the first page of your written testimony that you presented to the committee, you cite numerous statistics of the amount of emails and other communications that the 

IRS has produced for this committee and certainly for the Senate 

Finance Committee. But frankly, all of these statistics are irreleVerDate Sep 11 2014 10:20 Feb 07, 2017 Jkt 021117 PO 00000 Frm 00054 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 I:\WAYS\OUT\21117.XXX 21117

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vant if the effort doesn’t get us to the full truth. And certainly all 

of these statistics are minuscule when compared to the constitutional rights of the average citizens that have been trampled on 

through the process that was at this point to our understanding 

guided by Lois Lerner, perhaps others within the IRS. 

Since you have been on board at the IRS, you have had opportunity, obviously, to try to get your head around and hands around 

the scope of this investigation and the work that was actually conducted by Lois Lerner, perhaps others. So I would like to ask you, 

based upon your understanding of all that, what do you think Lois 

Lerner did wrong or did inappropriately in the handling of her duties while she was in charge of the tax-exempt organization application review process? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Good question. I have not independently investigated the matter, as I have said on occasions in the past. We 

have a lot of investigations going on. But I think it is clear, to the 

extent, as the IG found, that inappropriate criteria were used to select applications for further review, to the extent that applicants 

were required or requested to provide voluminous improper information, that was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. And we 

should do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

The IG made recommendations into what should be done. We have 

accepted all of those. We are implementing those. We are providing 

appropriate training and safeguards, because as I said earlier, I 

think it is critical for every American, no matter what their political beliefs, whether they go to church or they don’t go to church, 

whatever meeting they went to last week, if they wrote an op-ed 

someplace, should be confident that if they hear from us, it’s because of something in their return. And if somebody else had something else in their return that looked like that, they would hear 

from us again. I think that’s critical. And that is a commitment we 

have made. 

Mr. GERLACH. So you are basing that upon the IG’s report and 

investigation, but yet you just said you didn’t do your own investigation. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I have not. 

Mr. GERLACH. I would think, however, that if I were to become 

head of an agency like the IRS I would want to conduct an internal 

investigation of my own agency to understand fully what happened 

so I knew what happened because I am in charge of that agency. 

Do you have any plans to do your own internal investigation of this 

activity? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. When I arrived, it was very clear with all of the 

investigations going on, (A) the last thing I wanted to do was appear to be interfering with those investigations, talking to any of 

the potential witnesses. Secondly, my thought has been and continues to be, with six investigations and the amount of time going 

on, what I am looking forward to is being educated by the reports 

of those committees. 

They are going to—you all have spent more and more time. I 

have an agency to run with 90,000 employees. 

Mr. GERLACH. Okay, so you are not going to do your own investigation? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No, I am not going to be doing an investigation. 


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Mr. GERLACH. Okay. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I am looking forward to your facts. I am looking forward to your recommendations, will take those recommendations—— 

Mr. GERLACH. Well, it won’t be our facts. It will be everybody’s 

facts. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Everybody’s facts, whatever they are. 

Mr. GERLACH. Yeah, right. Let me ask you this in the time that 

I have: The new head of the Tax Exempt and Government Entities 

Division, Sunita Lough, recently announced that the IRS will restart audits of 501(c)(4) organizations that were selected during— 

for examination during the targeting and due to political activity. 

These audits were suspended after Acting Commissioner Werfel expressed concerns that they may have been tainted by the targeting. 

Indeed, the committee has found evidence that Lois Lerner, in 

fact, bypassed internal controls as you just indicated, and reached 

in to hand-select the right-leaning group for audit. Given these concerns and the evidence that Lois Lerner improperly influenced the 

audit selection of these groups, why would the IRS choose to reopen these audits? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Because we think and I think it is unfair to 

them to leave them in limbo, that they deserve to have closure. We 

have made it clear in our reaching out to them—— 

Mr. GERLACH. Why not just process their application and provide the answer to them without auditing the process? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. We are going to actually—we have noted that 

we are—any request for information that was inappropriate they 

don’t have to respond to. There will be new appropriate requests 

for the normal follow-up. We want to close those investigations so 

those organizations are not left in limbo, not unable to function. 

We will proceed with those effectively. It was my determination 

that we ought not to leave them out there, that we ought to appropriately review them—and in most of these cases, they get approved—and if they are going to get approved, we should do that. 

Mr. GERLACH. Thank you. 

Chairman CAMP. Dr. Price. 

Mr. PRICE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Commissioner, I also 

want to thank you for your service. There is this notion that we 

on this side of the aisle don’t appreciate what public servants do, 

and we do. But this is serious stuff. This is serious stuff. 

The perception of my constituents, and many folks across this 

great land, is that there has been a chilling activity on the part of 

the Internal Revenue Service to target folks because of their political views, and not just target those organizations, but then the 

IRS took donor lists from organizations, shared them with other 

groups, and then those individuals on those donor lists were audited at a degree higher than the usual rate; significantly higher 

than the usual rate. That is chilling, chilling stuff. 

So that’s the sense that many of us have and our constituents 

have. Your job is to rebuild this trust. And with all due respect, 

the comments that we have heard today, the processes that you 

have gone through haven’t begun to rebuild that trust. You have— 

you said that the work continues, the ongoing work continues. So 


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isn’t it true that for our friends to draw the conclusion of innocence 

is likely premature? Is that not correct? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I am not sure who whose innocence you are 

worried about. I would like to note that the statistics with we have 

shared with this committee and we are happy to continue to work 

with you, do not show that any donors were audited at a higher 

rate than people in the public, generally. If they were, it was a mistake, but there is no evidence that there was any systematic attempt to—— 

Mr. PRICE. We will provide you with the information that we 

have because it is clear that there were individuals who have 

been—and anecdotally, there is no doubt about it. But the statistics 

will show that folks who donated to these groups were audited at 

a higher rate. I want to get to a couple of specific questions. You 

said that you knew, you learned about the crash of this hard drive 

in February of this year, is that correct? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I learned there was a problem, a potential 

problem in February. We did not know—I was not advised that 

there had been a crash until into May when our IT people discovered it, and it wasn’t until into May that we understood and were 

able to complete the investigation of what the ramifications were, 

how many emails still existed and then started the investigation of 

how many other—— 

Mr. PRICE. When was Treasury informed? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I don’t know when Treasury was informed. I 

did not—— 

Mr. PRICE. They had to have been informed by the IRS, though, 

correct? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. My understanding from the White House letter 

is that sometime by mid-April in a conversation between counsel 

in the IRS and counsel at Treasury, they were advised that there 

was a problem with Lois Lerner’s emails, and that it was being 

fully investigated. 

Mr. PRICE. It was IRS counsel that informed the Treasury, is 

that right? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That’s my understanding, and that they were 

advised that we were investigating it. 

Mr. PRICE. Now, Secretary Lew has refused, to date, to provide 

emails as it relates to Lois Lerner and other items to this committee. Don’t you think it would be appropriate given—or maybe 

his computer is crashed—you don’t know if Secretary Lew’s computer is crashed, do you? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. My understanding is that you now, as of this 

morning, I haven’t seen any of these documents, or the presentations. 

Mr. PRICE. Don’t you think it would be appropriate for Secretary Lew—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. The Treasury Department has provided you all 

of their Lois Lerner email. 

Chairman CAMP. This morning, Dr. Price. This morning. We 

have not reviewed them yet. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. None of us have had a chance to review those, 

but that’s my understanding. So you do have now those emails, and 


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if there are any from—to or from Lois Lerner and Secretary Lew, 

you will have those. 

Mr. PRICE. Do you know if Lois Lerner had a BlackBerry or an 

iPhone? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I do not know. 

Mr. PRICE. You don’t know. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I do not know. 

Mr. PRICE. Do employees of the Internal Revenue Service carry 

mobile devices that are issued to them by the government? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. They carry mobile devices. The mobile devices 

run the same email system, people do not have on their office 

BlackBerrys, if they have them, or whatever mobile devices they 

have, they all run against the same email account. 

Mr. PRICE. Can you find out if Lois Lerner had an iPhone or a 

BlackBerry for us? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I can find that out and would be happy to let 

you know. 

Mr. PRICE. There is a notion on the other side that the IRS is 

just strapped for money; doesn’t have any money at all, can’t do a 

doggone thing because they don’t have any money. You are aware 

that the IRS has a studio that produced the famous Star Trek 

video that spends about $5 million annually on that studio, are you 

not? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No longer. That studio has been closed. We now 

have a review board and produce very few videos and they are not 

done in a fancy studio. And that was all 4 years ago. Since then, 

our budget has been cut by $850 million. 

Mr. PRICE. You are also aware that IRS employees used 521,000 hours in fiscal year 2013, at a rate of about $23.5 million for union 

activities, are you not? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That is right. That’s consistent across the government in terms of union employees, and all Federal agencies 

have a right to spend some portion of their time on official business 

for the union. And the IRS has a union. And those employees, pursuant to that process, do spend time on union time. 

Mr. PRICE. Might be appropriate for them to spend time on 

something else other than that. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. As long as there is a union, they will spend 

time. 

Chairman CAMP. Time is expired. Mr. Kind. 

Mr. KIND. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Commissioner, I want 

to thank you for your incredible patience and your testimony here 

today. And Mr. Commissioner, this, what you are seeing, is an expected reaction from an overzealous committee that is so desperate 

to find any type of evidence, any type of fact that may point to a 

cover-up that does not exist, point to a conspiracy that does not 

exist, and have instead chosen to go after a public servant who, by 

all accounts, is a model of integrity, honesty, and professionalism. 

I think you are the right person, at the right place, at the right 

time to help turn around a troubled agency. And this committee 

and this Congress should be working with you to get an IRS that 

is more responsive to the needs of the American public than this 

fishing expedition and witch hunt which has been going on for too 

long right now. 


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Mr. Chairman, I also want to ask unanimous consent to get two 

articles inserted into today’s record. One dated July 20th, 2011, a 

New York Times article that is titled ‘‘Three Groups Denied Break 

By IRS are Named.’’ And another one by the Center for Public Integrity titled: ‘‘IRS Says Liberal Group Too Political for Social Welfare Status.’’ 

Chairman CAMP. Without objection so ordered. 

Mr. KIND. And the reason I want those articles inserted today, 

Mr. Chairman, is to point out the extreme irony of this investigation. The only organizations that were applying for 501(c)(4) status 

with the IRS that were denied that application were organizations 

that were affiliated with Democratic candidates for office, not conservative organizations. In the case of the three groups that were 

denied status, they were Emerge Nevada, Emerge Maine, Emerge 

Massachusetts that only supported Democratic candidates for office. And in the other article, its subtitle is Agency Rejects Tax Exempt Application of a pro-Blanche Lincoln Arkansas For Commonsense. They were denied their application because they were 

viewed as too political. 

And that’s—and there’s no evidence at all that the IRS has denied any conservative group applying for (c)(4) status during the 

entire course of this investigation. 

So this fake rage occurring from the other side is just that. They 

are going after the IRS because of the political fodder that it brings 

to their base and it is unfortunate that we are having to conduct 

yet another witch hunt here today. 

Mr. Commissioner, let me ask you some quick questions here 

with the remaining time because you are under oath and we want 

to make this explicitly clear with your testimony. But to your 

knowledge, has anyone at the IRS deliberately withheld any emails 

requested by this committee? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No. 

Mr. KIND. To your knowledge, has anyone at the IRS withheld 

any information specifically requested by this committee? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No. I would note that we haven’t produced all 

the information we have because it is voluminous, but we have 

withheld no information. 

Mr. KIND. Has there been any attempt within the IRS to destroy 

any evidence to your knowledge? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No attempt by anyone during the course of this 

investigation to destroy any evidence. As noted, we freeze the 

email. In the past, emails were only retained for 6 months. 

Mr. KIND. And to your knowledge, has there been any attempt 

to tamper with any evidence or information requested by this committee? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. None. 

Mr. KIND. And since you have been acting Commissioner at the 

IRS have you seen any evidence of any attempt to cover up information pertinent to this committee’s investigation? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No. 

Mr. KIND. What about any information requested by the other 

investigations that have been occurring? I think you testified to six 

investigations that are still pending with the IRS. 


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Mr. KOSKINEN. We are providing the same information to all 

of the investigators. The tax writing committees get unredacted information. The non-tax writing committees get redacted information. So they have got about 170,000 pages fewer of information 

than this committee and Senate Finance. 

Mr. KIND. Have you seen any evidence of any direct involvement 

by the White House in the screening of (c)(4) applications that are 

the subject and involved in this investigation? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I have seen none. 

Mr. KIND. And has there been any evidence of any White House 

involvement in the IRS’s responses to the information requested by 

this committee? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I have seen none. 

Mr. KIND. Could you just give us a quick status update on the 

computer system at the IRS that you encountered when you took 

over as Commissioner? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Our computer system, as I said, is somewhat 

antiquated. We have been updating as much as we can. As noted 

in my testimony, we have about a $1 billion infrastructure as a result of the budget constraints. This year we are spending minimal 

amounts on that, as I noted. We still can’t get all of the employees 

on to Windows 7. I heard a reference earlier of somebody going to 

Windows 10. We should be so fortunate to get everybody on Windows 7. So we are significantly constrained, and our budget has 

been significantly underfunded on a declining basis over the last 4 

years. 

Mr. KIND. If you had a specific request for this committee, this 

Congress in regards to what we can do to assist the IRS to get an 

updated, more modern, functioning computer system, what would 

that be? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. We have given you proposal—the President’s 

budget would allow to us continue to make progress in that regard. 

We have at this point, 4- to $500 million of modernization in improvement activities that we would undertake. 

Mr. KIND. Already, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Chairman CAMP. Thank you. Mr. Smith. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and to our witness here 

for your time today, thank you. I realize—I think we have a large 

issue here. I know it has been dismissed as an overzealous reach 

of the committee, or a conspiracy similar to various others over history, political theater. I think you agree that this is a serious issue, 

and I think that moving forward, I would ask for full cooperation. 

It has been frustrating with the various responses that have been 

offered over the last I think 13, 14 months now. You mentioned 

contemporaneous documentation. Could you expound on that? I 

have an idea what that is, but I would like you to expound—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I am sorry contemporaneous—— 

Mr. SMITH. Contemporaneous documentation that you referenced earlier. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I was talking about, and by the way, if you 

wouldn’t mind, maybe I can give you the time in the middle of this 

2 hours, the last question I answered about what we knew when. 

As I noted in—— 


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Mr. SMITH. Sir, time is limited. If you would answer my question, please. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Okay, I will answer. Contemporaneous means 

that the email traffic that we have found in our search about the 

crash was email traffic at the time of the crash when—and the 

time of the attempted restoration 3 years ago. 

Mr. SMITH. Okay, and various documentation is recommended 

by the IRS with tax filers. Documentation is required to be retained how long? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Generally, as a general matter, people are subject to audits for 3 years unless there is criminal activity, and then 

we can go back, actually, in some cases, unlimited amounts. But 

as a general matter, unless you are a willful evader, we limit our 

audits to 3 years. 

Mr. SMITH. Now given, shifting gears just a bit here, when you 

look at the size of the IRS, 90,000 people that we are reminded at 

$2.4 trillion revenue, many would say that the core of power in 

Washington, D.C. is the Tax Code, 10,000 pages in length, various 

other descriptions of this. And it was noted earlier that a budget 

cut of $1 in the operating costs of the IRS results in costing revenues $7. Would you agree with that assessment? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Could I what? 

Mr. SMITH. That a $1 budget cut would result in a $7 cost to 

revenue? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. It depends on whom you ask as to whether it is $4, $6, or $8, or $7, $1, but it is clear, as I have said, for instance, if we had the pre-sequester, $500 million that we were denied this year, we would have provided back over $2 billion of revenue. So we do provide—we collect, in our personal activities four 

times—over four or five times the entire budget of the agency. 

Mr. SMITH. Okay, obviously, there are many opinions here, and 

I have to tell you that given the complexity of the Tax Code, and 

I think that is the main reason why we are trying to reform the 

Tax Code to come up with a simpler approach, my question, how 

possible it is to iron these issues out, that some dismiss, others find 

very serious. And I would hope that we could have the full cooperation as we do move forward. I would hope that you agree that this 

is not a finished case. Would you agree with that? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No, and we are anxious and delighted to continue to cooperate, as I noted. And I think it is important for the 

record, again, we have had a very good working relationship with 

your staff. And we have followed leads that they wanted us to follow, and it has been I think productive and we continue to hope 

to do that and we will be as responsive as we can to requests of 

the committee. I think it is important for us to do that. 

Mr. SMITH. Well, Mr. Chairman, I certainly hope that we can 

continue to get this resolved. I know that there are various characterizations here. It is disappointing that to—some would dismiss 

this situation here today. I hope that we can move forward. Thank 

you. 

Chairman CAMP. Thank you. Mr. Paulsen. 

Mr. PAULSEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Koskinen, I won’t 

go down the same line of questioning that has been used already, 

but I do want to highlight an example of a case in my district as 


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well. A small business person—I went out and toured this small 

business in Minnesota. This individual, small business person, that 

their company had been involved and subject to four different IRS 

audits over the past 10 years. The most of which—the most recent 

is actually still going on. So far, each of these audits has resulted 

in minimal, or zero, zero changes to the company’s income tax returns and the most recent audit that is going on right now has 

been going on for 18 months. It has cost the company over about 

$110,000. 

It is an audit that is done to help train IRS employees, ironically 

at a cost to the company. The agency has asked the company to 

produce an inordinate amount of information, even requesting a receipt for a $10 cab fare that occurred months ago. I am curious, 

Commissioner, if the company came forward tomorrow and said 

this information has been lost, this $10 cab fare we cannot find it, 

similar to the hard drives being undiscoverable, you would understand that, right? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Yes. 

Mr. PAULSEN. You would understand that and you wouldn’t 

hold them accountable? They wouldn’t have to produce that record? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I am not an exam agent, but if, as in this case, 

he said, I don’t have the receipt, but I can by other information 

demonstrate that it is pretty close to $10 is what I spent, that 

would be allowed, just as I provided you 24,000 Lois Lerner emails 

from the time of the crash. 

Mr. PAULSEN. If they had a system of hard drive crashes these 

went forward and they came forward and said, there’s nothing we 

can do; the servers are down; the hard drives are gone; we have 

no recollection; we can’t retrieve the data, would you end the audits? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. As I say, I am not an exam auditor expert. I 

can tell you that those trying to become compliant, whether they 

are individuals or they are businesses, we reach out to them and 

we are trying and anxious to work with taxpayers trying to become 

compliant. The ones we are concerned about are the people willingly and consciously avoiding taxes, especially those offshore. 

Those we are happy, I am happy to chase to the end of the earth 

and throw in jail. But the people trying to become compliant, we 

reach out to and do the best we can to, in fact, work with them. 

Mr. PAULSEN. And this is following just clearly on the same situation that Mr. Tiberi identified earlier, or that others have identified with individual cases in their districts, with our constituents 

who look to the IRS for impartial judgment, obviously—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Right. 

Mr. PAULSEN [continuing]. And understanding. Let me ask you, 

Commissioner Koskinen, if an employee at the IRS has a computer 

problem, is there a way to track when that employee called regarding the computer problem? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Yes, there are tickets, which is how we actually 

in February discovered that there had been a computer crash. I 

misspoke at the end of—middle of 2 hours at the last questioner, 

I said we didn’t know about the crash until the end of April. We 

didn’t know about the ramifications of the crash, as I said in my 

organized testimony. There was the ticket, in fact, information 


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from IT that said there was a crash which caused us to then take 

the time to figure out what did that mean? Had their emails been 

lost? That’s when we then discovered in the production of the 

emails the track of the emails that confirmed that, in fact, there 

had been a crash, there had been a significant effort trying to locate the emails. 

Mr. PAULSEN. So with that ticket would the IRS be able to 

track what the IT issue was that was actually being handled? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I don’t know what the details of the ticket are, 

but I do know from the correspondence and the emails that it was 

a hard drive crash and from some of Ms. Lerner’s emails that she 

was unable to get to her emails. 

Mr. PAULSEN. Would you be able to check based on the ticket 

who handled that particular IT issue and how it was resolved, the 

tracking mechanism within the IRS? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I don’t know what the ticket would show, but 

we would be happy to make sure you have the ticket and any information related to it. 

Mr. PAULSEN. Can you identify or tell me who at the IRS in 

the IT area handled Ms. Lerner’s computer crash issue in 2011? Is 

that knowable, who handled that IT crash issue? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Yes, it was a frontline—the correspondence was 

with a frontline IT manager. What was not ordinary was when it 

couldn’t be retrieved by the normal IT experts, to have it sent to 

the experts at the Criminal Investigation Division, which was an 

additional step taken—— 

Mr. PAULSEN. Can you tell me what caused Ms. Lerner’s hardware crash? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Pardon? 

Mr. PAULSEN. Can you tell me what caused the crash itself? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I do not know what caused the crash. In fact, 

in my understanding with computers, 3 to 5 percent of them crash 

as a general industry standard and there is no way to know why 

they crashed. 

Mr. PAULSEN. Can you rule out, Commissioner, what you know, 

or based on these tickets, can you rule out that Lois Lerner destroyed her own computer? Can you rule that out? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. There is no evidence that she did. And in fact, 

if she had done that—— 

Mr. PAULSEN. Can you rule that out, though? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Well, you can never rule out something you 

don’t know. But at this point there is no evidence, or the evidence 

is she worked very hard to try to restore her email. 

Mr. PAULSEN. And can you answer the questions about the 

hard drive crashes for the other six employees as well that were 

involved in the targeting, similar situation? Can we identify and 

make sure that they were not done intentionally? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. We are investigating that right now, and as I 

said, we will give you all of the information we are able to determine about when those computers crashed, whether any emails 

were lost, what has been done with the hard drives. To the extent 

they are still available, they will be made available. 

Chairman CAMP. Thank you. Mr. Pascrell is recognized. 


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Mr. PASCRELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me give you 15, 

20 seconds, sir. I am over here. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I am sorry. You are behind the stenographer. 

Mr. PASCRELL. To answer one of the questions you weren’t able 

to answer before in question, you wanted to correct the record. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That was just, and I started to correct the 

record, that as I said in my testimony, written testimony, we knew 

with the IT ticket in February there had been a crash. What we 

didn’t know until late April, was what the implications were. Had 

their emails been lost? If so, were there other emails that were 

from Lois in that time frame. So I have been consistent except for 

that one point, I am told. 

Mr. PASCRELL. Thank you. Do you agree that when the IRS 

grants a group tax-exempt status, now, that means that there is 

an advantage of one group as compared to another group in how 

they are taxed? This is important. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Yes. 

Mr. PASCRELL. And I don’t know what the number is, how 

much money the Federal Government doesn’t take in because we 

do exempt. I mean, the total amount of money. I am not—that’s not 

my question. 

Can they save significant tax advantage to a group, whether they 

are left, right, north, south, doesn’t matter, a significant tax advantage to that group, and its operations are being implicitly subsidized by you and me—you and I. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That’s correct. 

Mr. PASCRELL. Okay. Is that correct? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That is correct. 

Mr. PASCRELL. Yeah, I am not using hyperbole here, am I? 

That’s exactly what happens. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That’s exactly what happens. 

Mr. PASCRELL. So the taxpayers out there, do you actually 

think—I am going to ask your opinion—do you actually think they 

understand about what this is all about? I mean, this is not about 

what happened to the black box. This is about protecting the coverage that we have decided in our infinite wisdom to provide certain groups that are social groups, but not political groups. Now, 

do you believe the IRS has a responsibility to protect the taxpayers 

of this country by ensuring that the groups that we allow to operate as tax exempt are operating in a way that is consistent with 

the law? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I do and that applies to all 501(c) organizations. 

Mr. PASCRELL. Now, according to the law in this area, tax exempt 501(c)(4) groups are required to operate exclusively for social 

welfare in that that must be their primary purpose. Am I correct 

or incorrect? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That is correct. The regulation provides that 

your primary purpose has to be social welfare activity. 

Mr. PASCRELL. Now, let me ask you this then: Can you describe the process that the IRS currently uses to determine a 

501(c)(4) group is really a social welfare group or is engaging in an 

inappropriate amount of political activity? Is that an intensive 


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process that requires a lot of money? Requires a lot of manpower? 

Explain. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. It is a complicated process. We have 1,600,000 

tax-exempt organizations. 

Mr. PASCRELL. How many? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. 1,600,000 total of which somewhere in the 

range of 100, or 150,000 are (c)(4) social welfare organizations. A 

lot of them are garden clubs or people that have nothing to do with 

advocacy. When an organization applies for exemption, the historic 

process has been, their activities or proposed activities will be determined on a facts-and-circumstances test. And then there are a 

long set of examples and complicated regulations that describe how 

to determine the amount of activity that is social welfare activity, 

and what kinds of activities and the facts and circumstances are 

political activities, and so it is a complicated process. 

Mr. PASCRELL. But it is intensive? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. And it is intensive. 

Mr. PASCRELL. And it should be. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. And it’s what? 

Mr. PASCRELL. And it should be. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Yes, we take seriously across all 501(c)s our determination process. 

Mr. PASCRELL. In the last 4 years, how many organizations 

went from 501(c)(4)s to like any other organizations, in the last 4 

years? 

Chairman CAMP. Answer quickly, please. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I don’t know the answer, but I will get that for 

you. 

Chairman CAMP. Mr. Marchant. 

Ms. SA ́ NCHEZ. Mr. Chairman. 

Chairman CAMP. Yes. 

Ms. SA ́ NCHEZ. Parliamentary inquiry. 

Chairman CAMP. Yes, please state parliamentary inquiry. 

Ms. SA ́ NCHEZ. Since we are being summoned to vote and not 

all members will be given a chance to ask questions, I would like 

to know if those of us who do not have an opportunity to question 

the witness may submit comments and questions for the record? 

Chairman CAMP. Yes, and my plan is to recess and come back 

after votes, but—— 

Ms. SA ́ NCHEZ. Some of us have travel plans after votes. 

Chairman CAMP. I understand, yes, but members will be able to 

submit questions. Mr. Marchant. 

Mr. MARCHANT. I am privileged—— 

Chairman CAMP. Your microphone. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I keep forgetting to turn mine on as well. 

Mr. MARCHANT. This one is working. I am privileged to have 

a district that has a vast number of people that are very high tech. 

So Mr. Chairman, I would like to submit for the record a letter 

from one of my high-tech people that has some suggestions on how 

you may recover some of these emails that we are looking for. 

Chairman CAMP. Without objection, so ordered. 

Mr. MARCHANT. This—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Can I have a copy of that letter as well as for 

the record? 


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Mr. MARCHANT. Yes. I would be happy to provide it to you. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That would be great. 

Mr. MARCHANT. This entire inquiry was started because there 

were constituents in our district that were harassed and treated 

differently by the IRS. And whether we get all of the emails, ever 

get all of the emails involved in this, I think that it has already 

been established that this committee is dealing with this issue 

today not because it is a witch hunt, but because we have—our citizens in our districts were discriminated against and treated badly 

by the IRS. So that is why we are here today. 

Do you believe it’s important for this committee to receive all of 

the emails from Ms. Lerner’s email account and all of the emails 

from all of the persons that have been identified of interest in this 

case? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I have always thought that was important. 

Mr. MARCHANT. Is the IRS and its emails exempt from monitoring by the FBI or the NSA? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I have no information about that. But I have 

no indication that we are exempt from anybody’s monitoring. 

Mr. MARCHANT. So we don’t know that the emails are not totally all recoverable in some process? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. If the NSA was monitoring all of our emails 

and collecting them and saving them someplace, then they might 

be there. But I am not aware that that was done. 

Mr. MARCHANT. Have you, as a Commissioner, personally contacted the White House, the Treasury, the Federal Elections Commission, and any other possible Federal agency that Lois Lerner 

may have contacted by email? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I have not contacted any of those agencies 

about any of the issues involved in this investigation, including her 

email. 

Mr. MARCHANT. Would you be willing to commit to this committee that you will contact these agencies and request from them 

that all emails that they have—that they have on their records and 

can produce from Lois Lerner, and all of the people of interest, and 

request of them that they furnish them to you? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. This committee, I think, has already requested 

them. We don’t have authority over them and I am delighted to 

know that the White House and Treasury already have produced 

those. But with the other committees, I am happy to, on behalf of 

the committee, make a request that they provide any emails they 

may have. If you will give me that—remind me of the list of the 

agencies again, that would be helpful. 

Mr. MARCHANT. I will submit it to you in writing. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Great. 

Mr. MARCHANT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Chairman CAMP. Thank you. Ms. Black. 

Mrs. BLACK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you Mr. 

Commissioner for being here today. I am a bit confused about the 

timeline here and what was known or was not known about Ms. 

Lerner’s computer and the crash of her computer, and therefore, 

the lack of our ability to be able to get all of the emails. And this 

has gone on for about a year and a half now, and I read in your 

testimony before you came, and then I know you read your testiVerDate Sep 11 2014 10:20 Feb 07, 2017 Jkt 021117 PO 00000 Frm 00066 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 I:\WAYS\OUT\21117.XXX 21117

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mony to us, it appears that the first time you were made aware 

that there was actually a crashed computer was when you saw that 

the date distribution of the email was uneven. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No, I didn’t see that. I was—pardon me? 

Mrs. BLACK. Am I understanding that correctly that that was 

the first time that you knew about the crashed computer was when 

you determined after all of these files were given and you went 

back to look at them, you did a limited search there, and you said, 

whoa, there is something wrong here because there is an uneven 

distribution. Was that the first time that you were made aware 

that there was a crashed computer? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That’s the first time I was aware. That pattern 

caused people to do an investigation, and they found that there had 

been a crash, so I won’t told two separate issues. I was told that 

there was a pattern problem, and IT had determined that there 

had been a computer crash. 

Mrs. BLACK. So during this period of time, I find it very interesting, that is, we are asking for these emails, and we are asking 

for them over and over and over again, and they are not coming 

back to us in a timely fashion. And this was prior to your even getting there. That all of a sudden, you look and say, well, wait a 

minute, we don’t have emails from this time period. Something else 

might have gone on, that that is when we find out, or you find out, 

or anybody in the agency that has been getting this request from 

us and other—from the OGR committee for emails, that’s the first 

time it is found out? I find that to be very curious. 

No one else knew, no one else would come and say that? You had 

to find this out because you saw that there was some kind of uneven distribution in the dates? Does that seem odd to you? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No, the way the emails are pulled out of the 

pool of emails that are in the server there, is they are all pulled 

together in just a pool. The emails were extracted initially and 

11,000 of them were provided in response to the search terms, so 

they don’t get pulled out by time—— 

Mrs. BLACK. Mr. Commissioner, I know how many emails. You 

have talked about that so many times—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No, no. They get pulled out initially. I am just 

saying, they get pulled out initially by subject matter. 

Mrs. BLACK. This—let me just finish this because I only have 

a limited amount of time. But this discussion, and you say here, 

the discussion of the hard drive was made 3 years ago. And the 

hard drive is in the hands of the IG. So is that—I am confused 

here, does the—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Two hard drives. 

Mrs. BLACK. Okay. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. The hard drive that was recycled and destroyed 

was the hard drive that crashed in 2011. A new hard drive was 

provided to Ms. Lerner and she used that from then on, and that 

hard drive is—— 

Mrs. BLACK. That hard drive is gone. It is not in—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That hard drive was gone 3 years ago. This replacement hard drive was preserved and is in the hands of the Inspector General. 


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Mrs. BLACK. Okay, so we still do have a crashed hard drive that 

is not recoverable that is missing that information, and we will 

never get it because it is somewhere gone in space. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Three years ago. 

Mrs. BLACK. Now, is it not true that there are also a requirement by law that you keep paper records as well if computers do 

go down? Do you not have paper records that are required? That’s 

my understanding. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. We are required by law to keep paper records 

of official records, and there’s a definition under the Federal 

Records Act what our official records are for agency transactions. 

And then the employee is to print them out, create a hard copy of 

it, and preserve it. 

Mrs. BLACK. Okay, so I find all of that to be very curious that 

in all of these questions of us asking for these emails, that all of 

a sudden just recently someone comes up to say, oh, by the way, 

Lois Lerner’s email or hard drive is crashed, and we destroyed it. 

It is just gone. Can’t retrieve it. Now, these six other computers 

that we talk about that, or the other custodians—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Right. 

Mrs. BLACK [continuing]. I find that really curious, too, that 

that would be limited to that. So maybe you can help me out. Are 

there other computers that you have found? What percentage of 

computers, total computers have crashed within the Department? 

Are there more than just this six? Because it seems like if there 

are six people that are connected with this, then you may have had 

a huge crash over there with this many computers being crashed 

in just what we are asking for. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Right, the industry standard is you get 3 to 5 

percent failures, which means—— 

Mrs. BLACK. Is this 3 to 5 percent—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No, it means across 90,000 employees. 

Mrs. BLACK. So six of them that are related to this that are 

custodians? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. The 82 we have looked at had—at this point we 

are looking at 7, which is within what the industry normally expects, which is why I asked for a search. 

Mrs. BLACK. I have one more question for you—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Sure. 

Mrs. BLACK [continuing]. Because my time is going to run out 

here. 

Have you had any information that is taxpayer information lost 

due to these crashes? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I have no indication that taxpayer information 

has been lost. 

Mrs. BLACK. So this information is lost, but all of this information, you have on millions of taxpayers have not crashed, not been 

lost, not been destroyed, is that correct? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. There have been thousands of hard drive crashes in the IRS across time. 

Mrs. BLACK. But we haven’t lost any taxpayer information? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That I know of. But I don’t know—the taxpayer 

information is saved in separate files so we have access to it. 


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Mrs. BLACK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will have follow-up 

questions in writing. 

Chairman CAMP. Mr. Crowley, and then the committee will recess. 

Mr. CROWLEY. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. Commissioner, welcome. Let me start by saying, I understand the suspicions of the majority upon hearing 2 years worth of emails just 

disappeared. Put the shoe on the other foot. When Democrats were 

investigating the lies and the incompetence of the Bush administration, we would be in disbelief at this ineptitude as well—as you 

were, for example, when we learned that the Bush White House 

admitted that it lost nearly 5 million, 5 million emails between 

March 2003 and October 2005 related to the allegations of the politically motivated dismissal of then-U.S. attorneys. 

Fortunately, we can put suspicious minds at ease today. The Inspector General for the IRS, a man named J. Russell George, who 

was a Republican political appointee of President George W. Bush, 

has already testified that Ms. Lerner did not learn about the inappropriate criteria being used in local Cincinnati IRS office until a 

meeting of June 29th, 2011, at least 16 days after Ms. Lerner’s 

hard drive crashed. 

Yes, her computer crashed more than 2 weeks before she was notified about the inappropriate actions happening in Cincinnati. 

Now, like those who continue to refuse to believe that the birth certificate from the State of Hawaii is actually real, a conspiracy theorist will continue to rattle sabers, but really, does anyone in this 

room want to be seen in that light? 

Commissioner, as I mentioned, welcome. Today, the IRS has provided over 770,000 pages of documents involved in this investigation. Is that correct, sir? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That’s correct. 

Mr. CROWLEY. And included in these, in those thousands of 

pages of emails, PowerPoint presentations, and notes delivered to 

Congress over 9 months ago, wasn’t there information that specifically mentions the crash of Ms. Lerner’s computer? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Yes. Over time starting in the fall, and through 

the spring, the emails from Lois about her failure, her computer 

failure and the emails about the attempts to restore it have all 

been provided to this committee. 

Mr. CROWLEY. So the crash in Ms. Lerner’s computer should 

come as no surprise, no surprise if the majority were actually reading the documents that the IRS was sending up. You may not want 

to answer that question. 

Do you think American taxpayers would be upset to know that 

this phony investigation has already cost them over $16 million 

and counting when the Republicans aren’t even doing the basic due 

diligence of reading the documents that you are providing and 

sending to Congress? 

I wouldn’t necessarily want you to answer that question. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I am not answering that question. 

Mr. CROWLEY. Commissioner, or could it be that the majority 

in their zeal for an Academy Award for the best outrage in a fake 

drama are more upset that they were caught actually not reading 

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ing—sorry, proving that they are more concerned with the show 

trial than an actually—than actually finding answers. And once 

again, I am not going to ask you to answer that question. 

The Democrats on this committee have been outraged as has 

been said over and over again from the first day we heard about 

Ms. Lerner’s apology to a tax conference. We are angered by any 

singling out of any tax-exempt application based on ideology, 

whether it be for progressive groups or Tea Party extremists. And 

contrary to what Mr. Ryan said, progressive groups were targeted 

as well. That is a full statement that he made. 

We led the charge for her to be fired. We have agreed to oversight hearings with the determined zeal to find answers. And for 

that reason, Mr. Chairman, in an effort to get to the truth, the next 

hearing on this matter should be with the Inspector General of the 

IRS who has not been before this committee for over a year. Anything else would show that this committee is not using its time and 

resources seriously. With that, I thank the commissioner for being 

here today, and I yield back the balance of my time. 

Chairman CAMP. Thank you. The committee stands in recess 

until shortly after votes are concluded. 

[Recess.] 

Chairman CAMP. The committee will resume. Mr. Reed is recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. REED. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Commissioner, for being here today, and thank you for allowing us to go 

vote and come back and continue this hearing, Mr. Chairman. 

This is a really important issue, obviously. To now hear the loss 

of some critical emails, to me is something that is—I don’t understand how that could happen, why that could happen, but I want 

to get to the bottom of it as much as possible. And one of the things 

I found in your testimony that was intriguing was the actual referral of Lois Lerner’s hard drive and how she went about to try to 

‘‘recover’’ these emails. 

So my understanding is that she asked the IT representative 

to—my hard drive failed. There’s a problem with it. Can you take 

a look at it? That makes sense to me. But then there is another 

step. There is a step where it was referred to your criminal investigation department, your forensic experts in the IRS. Now, those 

are the folks that are well-trained in the area of criminal investigations, and these are top-notch forensic people, correct? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Correct. 

Mr. REED. Okay, so there is about an 11-day, maybe 12-day— 

it is like July 20th, where the technician, the IT guy goes to Lois 

Lerner supposedly and says, we can’t do anything about it, and 

then all of a sudden, she is told about 12 days later, as a last resort 

we are sending your hard drive to the CI, the criminal investigation, IRS division, for the forensic lab. Who was involved in any of 

those decision-makings that you are aware of during that period of 

time to send it to the forensic lab? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I don’t know any of the names of people who 

caused it to go there. It, as I noted in my testimony, is an extraordinary step in the sense of normally, if a hard drive is irretrievable, 

it would simply be destroyed. 


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Mr. REED. That’s my question, because you’re referencing your 

testimony, this is an extraordinary effort. And so we are dealing 

with a normal hard drive situation according to you for 3 years— 

from 3 years ago. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Right. 

Mr. REED. And yet, there is an extraordinary step taken sending 

to it the foreign lab. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Correct. 

Mr. REED. I am very interested to know, who made that decision, why that decision was made, and I will also submit some follow-up questions in writing so I can just—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That would be fine. My understanding just 

from the emails that are in that train and otherwise, is that it was 

a reflection of Ms. Lerner’s strong attempt to try to recover email. 

Mr. REED. So do you think that Ms. Lerner is the one who 

asked it to go to the criminal investigation unit? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I don’t know whether she was or not. I know 

she was pushing very hard to try to get the emails. On occasion, 

criminal investigation will do that, but it is an extraordinary step, 

because as you note they are very good at this, but they are spending most of their time with drug dealers and other criminal cases. 

Mr. REED. And I know I am running on a limited time. On the 

forensic—these are the well-trained people. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Right. 

Mr. REED. Now, when I have ever dealt with the criminal investigations, people in that—people like David Reichert, police officers, 

there’s reports that they go through. Have you see the report that 

the criminal investigation forensic report people provided as they 

did their review of Lois Lerner’s hard drive? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I have not. 

Mr. REED. Are there any reports that exist that the criminal investigation forensic unit will have completed? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I don’t know. 

Mr. REED. Were they typically—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. But we can—— 

Mr. REED. I mean, they are your criminal investigators. You 

have referred this matter 3 years ago, supposedly, to the criminal 

investigation unit to do a complete forensics—these are like the 

CSI guys. They are the guys that we watch on TV. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That is right. If you could restore the emails, 

they would have been able to do it. 

Mr. REED. But also they are doing an investigation as to why 

this hard drive failed is my understanding too, isn’t that correct? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No, there are any number of reasons as to why 

a hard drive fails. They would care—my assumption would be, they 

wouldn’t care why it failed. Their request was, can you reconstitute—— 

Mr. REED. Oh, no, no, no. See, they are criminal investigators. 

Because if there is malfeasance—— 

Mr. KOSKINEN. They are also civil investigators. 

Mr. REED. Yeah, but they are criminal investigations into your 

agency that are designed to catch criminals, and they are trying to 

figure out what criminal behavior potentially—if I get a referral, if 


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you send the hard drive to a criminal investigator in the IRS, my 

understanding, they are looking for illegal activity. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. No, actually—— 

Mr. REED. In other words, did somebody potentially damage this 

hard drive on purpose? What caused the damage? I mean, isn’t 

that something they would do in their normal course of business? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. They also do civil cases. All of our civil prosecutions and cases are investigated by criminal investigators. 

Mr. REED. Would you agree with me—would you agree with me 

that the criminal investigators are looking for criminal activity and 

that someone is trying to hide evidence, destroy evidence, that is 

relevant to a tax proceeding, that they are the guys that look into 

the forensics of the computer program to figure out what is going 

on? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. They will do that on occasion. There is no indication they were doing anything other than retrieving emails. 

Mr. REED. Yeah, so they received this hard drive on something 

as critical as this, and that’s why I am asking those questions. I 

am very interested in knowing what those forensic folks, who they 

were—do you know who they were, first off? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I don’t know who they were. 

Mr. REED. Yeah, I would like to really know who they were, 

when they completed it, the paperwork and the documentation for 

chain of evidence purposes that they are trained in, I would definitely like to know what those records are and have them provide 

it to our office. And I guess my time is expired, and with that, I 

yield back. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Great, that’s fine. Good. 

Chairman CAMP. Thank you. Mr. Young is recognized. 

Mr. YOUNG. Mr. Commissioner, you have mentioned a number 

of times today that the IRS learned of certain things at certain periods of time; that perhaps even your office has learned of certain 

things at different periods of time. I would like to know, and you 

correct me if you have already spoken to this, when you knew personally as Commissioner of the IRS, when you knew that we had 

a problem here that emails were lost or destroyed; that that constituted a larger issue and so forth. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. When I first was advised about it, we didn’t 

know whether any emails had been lost or destroyed. But in February—— 

Mr. YOUNG. When were you first advised of it, just so I am 

clear, February? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. In February, I was advised that there was an 

issue with her emails, and subsequently, in the same time, I was 

advised about that, and there was evidence that there had been a 

hard drive crash, but nobody knew what the implications of that 

were in terms of whether any emails had been lost, or whether the 

hard drive had been recovered. All I knew, I was advised in February was that there was an issue with the initial production, review of emails, once we had started looking at all of her emails, 

and that there was a hard-drive cash and we needed to investigate 

what that meant. And that’s what proceeded. 

Going forward by mid-March we had determined, found the fact 

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successfully, then started reprocessing all of her emails to make 

sure there were none missing and reprocessing all of the custodial 

emails to see what email of Ms. Lerner’s were available. 

Mr. YOUNG. Okay. So you thought it was presumably premature at that point. I have given you the opportunity to offer all 

the context you wanted to. Premature to notify this committee or 

anyone else of your knowledge, your personal knowledge. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. My approach was that we needed to know, A, 

what this meant, what had been the result, and ultimately what 

emails, if any, were available and what emails, to the extent we 

could find them, were not available. And that if we gave a fulsome 

report, it would be more productive. And in fact, that’s been my 

normal practice. 

Mr. YOUNG. And others have spoken to the fulsomeness of that 

report, so I won’t get into that, sir. We have invoked the Federal 

Recordkeeping Act. You yourself invoked it on at least one occasion, 

the Federal Records Act, that requires agencies to store and preserve certain documents. Why did the IRS change its document retention policy in May of 2013, the same month Lois Lerner announced this targeting initiative? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. IRS—I wasn’t here, but my understanding, 

they changed their document retention policy in May in response 

to this investigation. In other words, once the investigation started, 

the instructions went out to save all emails of everyone, that we 

would no longer recycle them every 6 months, that we would in fact 

make sure that nothing was changed. 

Mr. YOUNG. Okay. Thank you, sir. Please explain to me why the 

IRS did not instead change its document retention policy when 

TIGTA initiated its investigation and started working with the 

IRS, whereupon it presumably became clear that there was a document retention problem. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I wasn’t there at the start of the TIGTA investigation, but I would note there is no evidence at this point we 

know of that any emails were lost after that point in time. 

Mr. YOUNG. Okay. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. But then I would stress that, as I have noted 

several times, the final request I made was to review all 

custodians, and that process has been going on. We got the identification of those this week, and we are reviewing that, and we will 

share all of that information with you as well. 

Mr. YOUNG. Okay. It is my understanding that Sunita Lough, 

who is the new head of the Tax Exempt and Government Entities 

Division, has resumed audits of 501(c)(4) organizations that were 

selected for examination during the targeting and due to political 

activity. These audits were suspended after the Acting Commissioner Werfel expressed concerns they may have been tainted by 

targeting. Given these concerns and the evidence Lois Lerner improperly influenced the audit selection of right-leaning groups, why 

would the IRS choose to reopen these audits? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Well, they were left as pending. It is my decision that those organizations deserve the right to get to closure on 

that. We made it clear to them that whatever requests for documentation in the past, which may or may not have been overreaching, would not apply. We would do this in a straightforward 


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way. My thought was it was important to let them know that they 

could get to closure. And we expect that we will. 

Mr. YOUNG. But these groups were targeted we now know, and 

you resumed audits among a body of different groups that may 

have been improperly targeted. And that seems not only counterintuitive, but certainly ill-advised. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Well—— 

Chairman CAMP. Time has expired. If you could answer briefly. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. To the extent that an audit had begun, it 

seemed to me better for them and better for the process to close 

those so there was no implication that had we completed the audit, 

they might have actually been decertified or had a problem. So that 

we are moving toward closure, and we don’t have any reason to assume that they won’t all be cleared and that they will be able to 

operate appropriately. 

Mr. YOUNG. My time has expired. Thank you, sir. 

Chairman CAMP. Thank you. 

Mr. Kelly. 

Mr. KELLY. Thank you, chairman. Thank you for having the 

hearing. 

Commissioner, good to see you again. We had about an hour’s 

conversation earlier this week. I think the one thing we both 

agreed on is that I believe there is almost irreparable damage done 

to the agency, and the process, as it continues to unwind, makes 

it harder for the American people. Now I am talking about average 

everyday people who are held to an entirely different set of standards when it comes to what the IRS needs from them and documents, information that they need to keep for a long, long time. 

And when you are on the other side of the table, you are really not 

allowed to say, Well, my hard drive crashed. You know how this 

stuff goes. I just can’t get to it. 

But one of the things I think that really makes this important— 

this has nothing do with the IRS by the way, and you and I agreed 

on that Tuesday—what we do agree on is that, again, the irreparable damage. And kind of the building back again what people 

have known for a couple hundred years. I think if you go back to 

I think it is Daniel Webster and Chief Justice Marshall, they say 

the power to tax is the power to destroy. So, for over 200 years, 

this is in the back of people’s minds. And as I have sat in the private sector and watched the IRS come in, there is nothing more 

chilling than to get that letter, or that call, or that visit, because 

you know right away, it’s going to be a tough day for you. 

Now, whether people actually do that or not is another question. 

It’s what people believe, because perception is reality. 

I would just say to you on this, see everything I look at, we knew 

well in advance that Ms. Lerner’s emails were not going to be 

available. I mean, years ago, we knew they weren’t going to be 

available. And I think the thing that bothers people on the committee is that we were told, No, you are going to get everything. 

Just give us a little more time. Just give us a little more time. How 

much more time do you think not just this committee but the 

American people can withstand? I think we have reached a point 

now where they are exhausted of waiting. 


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This is not an indictment of you, because I think you are trying 

to do the right thing. But the agency right now is tainted. And it’s 

kind of reaffirmed what most of us believe, that we are guilty until 

we prove ourselves innocent. Now, in this case, I am looking at this 

information, I can’t understand why, with all the knowledge that 

we knew, going back as far as 2011, that this stuff wasn’t retrievable and telling Ms. Lerner herself, Hey, listen, sorry, can’t get it 

for you. As a last resort, we sent your hard drive CI’s, the IRS 

Criminal Investigation, forensic lab to attempt data recovery. On 

August 5, 2011, after 3 weeks of attempts to retrieve her emails, 

Ms. Lerner was advised, unfortunately, the news is not good. The 

sectors on the hard drive were bad which made your data unrecoverable. I am very sorry. Everyone involved tried to do their best. 

And so the IRS knew this. 

You see where I am coming from. If you knew it so long ago, why 

is it so difficult to just tell people the truth? I am not accusing you. 

But this is a very dangerous slope that we are on. When do we tell 

the American people the truth? That truthfully, right now, we are 

not going to be able to answer what you are asking us. I just don’t 

get it. What is the strategy as you move forward? How do you restore the faith and confidence of the people of the United States in 

this agency and in this body? We have all taken an oath to defend 

the Constitution. And yet I see there is two set of rules. There is 

one for the general public. There is one for your agency. General 

public is not allowed to keep bad records. General public is not allowed to have hard drives crash. The general public is not allowed 

to do some of the same things that we have allowed the agency to 

do. And they say, see, you don’t understand, this is the way it has 

to play out. Again, going back to our conversation on Tuesday, 

where do you see this going? Because I don’t see a bright end to 

this anywhere along the way. At the very least, it’s going to come 

out that somehow people knew about this but refused to be forthcoming about it. That is the best you can do on this. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. The record should note that no one knew in the 

IRS about this at the time we have been working on until we actually in February discovered it. The emails involved in fact were 

provided to this committee along the way in the normal production, 

and nobody was paying attention—— 

Mr. KELLY. No, no, no, Commissioner that is not true. You 

knew in August—not you, because you weren’t there, the agency 

knew in August of 2011 that they couldn’t retrieve this information, yet we have been constantly told we will get you everything. 

And the fact that you haven’t been forthcoming—not you but your 

agency—adds to the dilemma that now we face. We have reinforced 

the people’s greatest fear, that the IRS works in a completely different set of rules than the general public. People’s constitutional 

rights have been violated, but we have chosen to turn a blind eye 

and a deaf ear to the American people, and have continued to 

stonewall them, hoping that somehow we can run out the clock. 

This is not a partisan issue. This is bipartisan. And I don’t want 

to hear anybody say it’s about an election. Is it about an election? 

I would say it is about an election. But it’s not the way they intone 

it. So, listen, I appreciate you being here. I admire what you are 

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store faith and confidence the American people have to have in this 

form of government we have. 

Chairman CAMP. Time has expired. 

Mr. KELLY. Because that’s what it comes down to. It’s all about 

trust, and nobody trusts the IRS right now. In fact, they don’t trust 

us as much as they need to. 

Chairman CAMP. Thank you. Time has expired. 

Mr. Griffin. 

Mr. GRIFFIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Thank you, Commissioner, for being here. I just want to follow 

up on a few of the issues. When asked by my colleagues why the 

timing of the disclosure regarding the hard drives was June as opposed to May or April or March or earlier, you indicated that you 

thought it made sense to just wait until you got all the information 

or did your analysis or what have you and to sort of, once you got 

all that figured out, then let us know. 

I would just tell you, having been a counsel on the House Government Reform Committee, having served on this committee, having served at the White House and in the Department of Justice, 

I wouldn’t take that approach anymore. That is not the way this 

city works. When you know and anyone at the IRS—in fact, I 

would say that you were disserved your—by the legislative folks at 

the IRS. If they did not tell you when you started, they should have 

walked in and said, This is a hot topic. There are numerous hearings on the Hill. Senators and Members of Congress, particularly 

the Ways and Means Committee, is going to want to know what’s 

going on with this Lois Lerner situation. By the way, we have some 

hard drive problems, and we never told anybody. Let’s not wait. It’s 

in everybody’s interests to tell the Hill. 

Now, I know about the 770,000 documents and all that stuff. I 

used to be the guy on the House Government Reform Committee 

who on a Friday night got a box, got 10 boxes from the White 

House in the late 1990s. I was the guy that actually went through 

those thousands. And I can tell you that the numbers are misleading, because you get a bunch of blank sheets, you get a bunch 

of nothing. There is not a lot of substance there usually. Yes, I understand you are producing them, a bunch of them. But the number in and of itself doesn’t tell you a lot. 

But the bottom line is I would just approach this committee differently, and I think you would get a different response from now 

on. Because people here feel like they need to know, and they want 

it to be a conversation. They don’t want it to be a situation, and 

I know how this works, where the leg folks say, and the White 

House says, Don’t answer that unless they ask you specifically. If 

they don’t ask the right question, don’t give them that answer. Now 

I can tell you that happens all the time. And I know for a fact that 

it happened to one of my colleagues here that was telling me earlier, not necessarily with you, but with someone else. 

I give you an example. So you were interviewed in March of this 

year in a fellow committee, and you were interviewed by the Chairman Boustany up there, Dr. Boustany, and there were numerous 

times where you were asked about the Lois Lerner emails. And you 

would say things like, We are going to produce them. We are working on redactions. We are looking at this; we are looking at that. 


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There was never one mention of an issue, as you describe it. There 

was never one mention of a glitch. And you know, with all due respect, my daughter’s here with me this week. That’s like when 

she—I don’t ask the right question about what she ate, and then 

I find out that she ate a box of cookies and she didn’t tell me because I didn’t ask the right question. Well, she didn’t tell me because she knew I’d be mad. And I think you had numerous opportunities in these transcripts to just say, Hey, we are going to get 

you all the emails that we have, but I want you to know we have 

got some problems. And you should know about the hard drive. 

And it never happened. 

We faced this with Lois Lerner when we asked about the (c)4s. 

We never asked them the precise right question, so we never got 

our answer. I know how that game’s played. I have been up here 

long enough. And I’m saying if you want to get a different attitude 

from this committee, go ahead and share what the political people 

are telling you not to share. Just tell us. Just tell us, share it. And 

if it’s surplusage, we’ll ignore it. 

And one more thing. I do have a question. Do you know of anyone in the IRS who has gone before a grand jury on this issue, or 

do you know of any grand jury subpoenas that have been issued 

on this investigation? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I know of none. 

Mr. GRIFFIN. None. None whatsoever. Do you know of a Department of Justice investigation on this at all, criminal investigation? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I don’t know anything about that investigation. 

I have not interfered with anybody’s investigation. 

Mr. GRIFFIN. Thank you. 

Chairman CAMP. Thank you. 

Mr. Renacci. 

Mr. RENACCI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Thank you, Commissioner, for being here. And thank you for 

sticking around. Just a couple things to try and wrap up some 

things I heard. You testified earlier that 3 to 5 percent is a normal 

crash rate for hard drives. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. That’s what I am advised. 

Mr. RENACCI. Okay. And there were 82 IRS employees with 

some potential political role in political targeting; seven hard drives 

failed. That’s approximately 9 percent. Can you get me some information as to what the normal crash rate is for the IRS computers? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I would be delighted to get that. I am advised 

that once you get outside the warranty period, the failure rate goes 

to 10 to 16 percent, but we will get you all of that information. 

Mr. RENACCI. I would appreciate that. The other thing that 

concerned me based on what I have been hearing today is that 

there was a hard drive failure, it was realized, it was then investigated. At some point in time, someone said we can’t get the information off of it. And then it was destroyed. Is that a normal process to destroy, especially in the middle of an investigation, destroy 

a hard drive? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. I would stress again that that hard drive was 

never destroyed during an investigation. Nothing has been destroyed during this investigation. That hard drive was destroyed 3 


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years ago, after it was irretrievable in terms of email, and it had 

nothing to do with this investigation. 

Mr. RENACCI. Okay. Well, I would also tell you that I practiced 

in front of the IRS for about 25 years as a CPA. I have had to— 

I have had some very unusual clients, I will tell you, that had some 

information that wasn’t around, had their hard drives lost, had a 

lot of things occur, and had to listen to the IRS say to them, Why 

did you destroy, even though you weren’t being audited back then, 

why would you destroy something that has information that might 

be needed? And I know you talked about the 3 years and the 10 

years. But I have also seen the IRS bring a guy down on his knees 

in tears because they said we are going to prosecute you to the full 

extent of the law because you don’t have the proper information. 

Now, when did the standard change that the individual that you 

are auditing has to do certain things but the IRS doesn’t have to 

keep information or have to keep hard drives or have to make sure 

that their documentation is safe? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. As the record will note, from all the indications 

we have, Ms. Lerner worked very hard and the IT department 

worked very hard to restore that information, not to lose it. 

Mr. RENACCI. I understand that. But when did it change that 

there would be a destruction of a document, which is a hard drive, 

knowing that it could potentially—there is data on there that 

might be needed? 

Mr. KOSKINEN. Nobody at that time viewed the data as being 

related to an investigation. As a general matter, if an employee’s 

hard drive fails and the information cannot be retrieved, it is regularly recycled and destroyed. 

Mr. RENACCI. I will also tell you that it’s interesting how you 

answer those questions. And your answers—I think you have heard 

people saying we have to restore trust to the American people. 

Your answers probably should be that we are going to make sure 

that we look at our processes in the future. I wasn’t here 3 years 

ago. And we are going to make sure we are not destroying hard 

drives until we fully know that they are not going to be an issue 

for the future. And that would be what something I think the 

American people would rather hear than, Well, it was destroyed, 

especially in this situation that we have today. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. It’s a very good suggestion, but I think it’s important not to leave any implication here that there was any attempt to get rid of evidence even before the investigation started. 

I think it’s important to remind people that the evidence demonstrates Ms. Lerner worked very hard, the IT system people 

worked very hard, the CI Division worked very hard trying to restore the emails. 

Mr. RENACCI. I don’t practice in front of the IRS any more; of 

course, I am here. But if I did, I wonder how that answer would 

be taken sitting in front of an IRS agent. 

Mr. KOSKINEN. If a client came before the IRS and said, I have 

lost the data, but here’s all the evidence that when I lost it all, I 

did to try to retrieve it, here is alternate evidence, like the 24,000 

emails that we have provided, I would hope that the IRS would 

look at the person as somebody who is trying to comply, not somebody who is trying to evade. 


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Mr. RENACCI. Well, I can tell you from past history that doesn’t 

happen. And in many cases, I am not going to tell you in all cases, 

because you do have some very good employees, but in some cases, 

I have seen them actually prosecute to the full extent of the law, 

which is not fair when an individual says, I don’t have it, I have 

lost it, I don’t have the opportunity to get it, and I don’t have other 

information available to bring it together. So, again, this is all 

about the American people and them having an opportunity to get 

some full faith back in the IRS. But at the same time, how are they 

ever going to do that when you stand there and say, We didn’t do 

anything wrong, we destroyed a hard drive, it wasn’t part of the 

process, but yet when the other side, when the shoe’s on the other 

side and the individual taxpayer sits in front of you and says, I 

don’t have the information, they are always prosecuted to the full 

extent of the law? Thank you. I yield back. 

Chairman CAMP. All right. 

Thank you very much. 

Mr. Renacci is our last questioner. 

With that, this hearing is now adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 1:00 p.m., the committee was adjourned.] 

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