IRScommissionertellsCongresstheagencyowesno

IRS commissioner tells Congress the agency owes no apologies

posted at 2:01 pm on June 20, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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Really? Not even just a little bit, just to say, “Sorry about the whole not-retaining-our-records-when-we-demand-that-you-do” sort of thing? IRS Commissioner John Koskinen asserted that the IRS owes no apologies for the curious epidemic of hard-drive failures among officials involved in the targeting scheme, whose e-mails Congress has spent the last year-plus demanding from the IRS:

CAMP: What I didn’t hear in that was an apology to this committee.

KOSKINEN: I don’t think an apology is owed. There are not a single e-mail has been lost since the start of this investigation. Every e-mail has been preserved that we have. WE have produced or will produce by the end of this –

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

Note well that smirk on Koskinen’s face as he proclaims this, too. We’ll get back to the qualifier Koskinen uses in a moment. Katie Pavlich followed the hearing and reported the exchange on Twitter:

"What I didn't hear in that statement is an apology to this Committee" -Chairman Camp #IRS

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) June 20, 2014

"I don't think an apology is owed" -Koskinen #IRS. Wow.

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) June 20, 2014

Fox had more:

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said Friday there is no need for his agency to apologize amid accusations of a cover-up in the targeting scandal of conservative groups after claims surfaced that ex-official Lois Lerner’s hard drive was destroyed and emails from several other officials also have gone missing. …

Committee Republicans now say that the IRS may have known about this for months, and that the agency may have lost emails from another six employees.

“The IRS in charge of hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ information. And you’re now saying your technology system was so poor that years’ worth of emails are forever unrecoverable?” Camp charged. “How does that put anyone at ease? How far would the excuse ‘I lost it’ get with the IRS for an average American trying to file their yearly taxes who may have lost a few receipts.”

Read Noah’s post for a litany of reasons why the IRS owes the American public an apology. They may owe one to Orrin Hatch as well. He met with Koskinen on Monday to discuss the sudden revelation of the hard-drive crash in Lois Lerner’s computer, and now says that Koskinen never mentioned during that conversation that six other drives had been similarly destroyed:

Hatch fired off a letter to Koskinen on Thursday voicing concerns that he met with him on Monday, yet the commissioner and his staff did not mention that emails from six other employees might be missing.

Koskinen’s still not sure how many e-mails are missing, either:

The commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service refused to apologize to Congress for losing e-mails related to its targeting of conservative groups, saying it’s still attempting to recover the data and it’s too soon to know how many e-mails are missing.

“I don’t think an apology is owed,” Commissioner John Koskinen told the House Ways and Means Committee. “Every e-mail has been preserved that we have.”

Translation: We’ve dutifully saved everything that we, er, saved. Does that fly in a tax audit? I’d bet that smirk wouldn’t. Don’t be surprised if this declaration becomes a hot topic in Monday’s Oversight hearing.

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Tags: Dave Camp, IRS scandal, John Koskinen, Paul Ryan

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IRStellsGOPcommittee:We’veloste-mailsfrom

IRS tells GOP committee: We’ve lost e-mails from six more employees involved in scandal

posted at 1:21 pm on June 17, 2014 by Allahpundit

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And all of them, apparently, were lost in computer crashes. That’s novel. Normally, when an agency doesn’t want to comply with a document request, it simply lies by claiming that no such document exists.

I’ll spare you a click and Voxsplain this one right here: Clearly the answer is to increase the IRS’s budget, so that they can afford more reliable PCs.

Seriously, though, who’s getting fired?

It’s not just Lois Lerner’s e-mails. The Internal Revenue Service says it can’t produce e-mails from six more employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups, according to two Republicans investigating the scandal.

The IRS told Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp and subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany that computer crashes resulted in additional lost e-mails, including from Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who was fired in the wake of the targeting scandal.

The revelation about Lerner’s e-mails rekindled the scandal and today’s news has further inflamed Republicans. Camp and Boustany are now demanding a special prosecutor to investigate “every angle” of the targeting. They expressed particular outrage that the agency has known since February that it would not be able to produce the e-mails requested by the committee yet did not apprise the committee of that fact, and they charged in a statement that the IRS is attempting to “cover up the fact that it convenient lost key documents in the investigation.”

Show of hands: When was the last time your computer crashed so hard that important data — e-mails, specifically — were lost and couldn’t be retrieved? I’ve used PCs and Macs every day for the past eight years, for 12 hours a day or more during weekdays, and I can’t remember experiencing something like that. It’s an “Internet 2001″ problem, not “Internet 2011,” especially given how cheap and ubiquitous back-up drives are today — and yet it happened to the IRS, apparently, no fewer than seven times, as recently as three years ago. And by the way, why are IRS e-mails being saved locally to employees’ hard drives instead of to a central server, a la e-mail programs like Gmail? The agency is required by statute to preserve records; the easiest way to do that for e-mail would be to store everything in a central cloud. Why doesn’t the IRS do that?

Or … do they? Here’s what Bryan Preston found out when he spoke to a former IRS IT specialist about the agency’s protocols:

“These environments were required by federal regulations to be redundant and recoverable,” the former IRS IT worker says. “The recoverability requirements were put into place for exactly the reasons we see today.” Disposal of records outside the statutory standards requires permission in writing.

He says that the IRS uses Microsoft Outlook/Exchange systems, which are backed up using Symantec NetBackup…

The former IRS IT worker adds that in his time on the prime contract, “I have worked for many federal agencies and the IRS had some of the best people.”

“This reason is why I scoff at the story being put out. Those folks would not have had such a short retention period for email unless they had it in writing from the highest levels. It would have made the local IT water cooler gossip if the IRS had screwed up and lost tons of email by accident.”

Is there any contemporaneous evidence that corroborates the computer-crash explanation? There is in Lois Lerner’s case: The IRS produced an e-mail exchange from 2011 in which Lerner and an IT person discussed the damage to her hard drive. If they were dealing with a plague of crashes, though, in which seven people or more lost data due to computer failures, there should also be contemporaneous evidence of the IT department noticing that the problem was systemic. Is there any? Hard to believe people at the IRS, of all places, would have shrugged at seeing potentially important data on multiple hard drives going up in smoke.

Either the IRS’s IT department is miserably incompetent, in which case lots of people should be fired, or the data destruction is deliberate, in which case lots of people should go to jail. Over to you, Ron Fournier. Exit question: Did anyone not connected to the targeting of conservative nonprofits lose any e-mails or is this curious string of bad luck confined to the principal players?

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Tags: computer, crash, Dave Camp, e-mails, IRS, Lois Lerner, nicole flax

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Housecommitteechair:Sebeliusliedwhenshesaid

House committee chair: Sebelius lied when she said she doesn’t know how many ObamaCare enrollees paid their first premiums

posted at 2:01 pm on March 26, 2014 by Allahpundit

Dave Camp uses the more delicate term “evasive and perhaps misleading” in his letter to her but it’s clear enough what he means. This wouldn’t be the first term the White House has been, ahem, evasive and perhaps misleading when it comes to enrollment data either. Sebelius and Jay Carney spent last October hemming and hawing over why they hadn’t released any early enrollment figures yet, insisting it’d be premature to do so and that numbers would be reported at regular intervals. Turns out they had a daily dashboard on Healthcare.gov that was keeping them updated all along. The big take on day one, as you might recall, was … six enrollments. Nationwide.

This new lie is more fun than the earlier one, though, just for the sheer balls required to muster the spin they’re using to deflect it.

Camp (R-Mich.) and Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) say they have uncovered “new evidence” that “strongly suggests that the administration knows who has enrolled and paid their first month’s premium.”

The congressmen pointed to an online regulations portal run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that says insurers are required to inform the agency of “the full enrollment and payment profile” for consumers on a monthly basis…

“As we have said previously, information about who has paid his or her premium is collected by individual issuers and is not reported to CMS directly by enrollees,” HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said in a statement.

“Until the automated payment and reporting system is completed and fully tested, and CMS is able to access individual enrollment and payment information from individual 834 forms, the payment information that CMS receives from insurers is neither final nor complete,” she added. “When we have accurate and reliable data regarding premium payments, we will make that information available.”

In other words, insurers are required to report to CMS every month how many people have paid. The data exists and is right at CMS’s fingertips; even if it’s incomplete, the rate of payment among insurers who have already reported will give us some sense of the rate of payment nationally.

But CMS, which built a website that didn’t work for two months and continues to have back-end problems to this day, doesn’t feel comfortable trusting outside entities. They’d prefer to use their own data, which … doesn’t exist yet because the website’s payment system still hasn’t been built. And they also want to be sure the numbers they give the public are “final” and “complete,” even though the whole reason people keep bugging them for payment data is that CMS’s own highly touted monthly enrollment figures aren’t remotely “final” or “complete” without it. Remember, if you missed the deadline to pay your first premium, your enrollment will be canceled; if it’s true, as anecdotal evidence suggests, that fully 20 percent of new enrollees failed to pay on time, that means HHS’s latest enrollment number of 5+ million as of March 1st could be off by a million people. If they were sincerely worried about misleading the public with incomplete figures, they’d refuse to release enrollment data at all until they knew for sure how many people were, or would be, bounced from the rolls on nonpayment grounds. As it is, they’re more than happy to release crap numbers which they know are artificially inflated in the name of doing what they can to help Democrats facing reelection this fall.

While we’re on the subject, via the Free Beacon, here’s another brazen lie Sebelius told Congress a few weeks ago. Exit question via Dan McLaughlin: At what point is a special prosecutor finally on the table here?

Tags: data, Dave Camp, Department of Health and Human Services, enrollment, first, month, portal, premiums, sebelius, ways and means

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HouseDemswhippingagainstObamaCarefix posted

House Dems whipping against ObamaCare fix

posted at 8:01 am on March 14, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Yesterday, the Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan noted that the “fix it don’t nix it” messaging on ObamaCare from Alex Sink failed because it just reminded Republican voters why they needed to send their own message to Democrats. I argued in response that Sullivan was partly correct, but the basic problem with that strategy is that Democrats won’t offer any “fixes” either. They won’t touch the law they created, not even in the chamber where Democrats control the outcome and could write the legislation any way they want.

It didn’t take long to find proof of this point. The Hill reports that House Democratic leadership has begun whipping their caucus to oppose a bill  that would fix ObamaCare’s damage to Medicare — even though Republicans want the same kind of delay that the White House has been unilaterally imposing on everything else:

Democrats are furiously whipping their caucus against a Republican bill that would pay for a bipartisan Medicare fix by delaying ObamaCare’s individual mandate.

That’s a change: Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) did not whip a similar Republican bill earlier this month to remove the penalty for not buying insurance in 2014. The bill passed the House and picked up 27 Democratic votes in the process.

But Democrats desperately need to circle their wagons around the healthcare law after a devastating setback in Florida this week, where their loss in a special election exacerbated worries that ObamaCare will sink the party in this year’s midterm elections.

Hoyer didn’t whip the earlier bill in the House, in large part because his Senate colleagues would have killed the bill anyway. That may not be the case now, after Sink’s surprising defeat in the FL-13 special election. Red-state Democrats who planned on using Sink’s “fix it don’t nix it” strategy just got an object lesson in how dangerous such a vote would be if forced to take it on a House bill that passes with significant number of Democratic votes. Democrats have no chance at taking back the House, and now they’re just playing defense on holding the Senate.

Democrats deny that the election had anything to do with this decision, of course. “We were always going to whip this bill,” one aide told Jonathan Easley, even though the earlier, similar bill passed with 27 Democrats voting in favor. It’s just a remarkable coincidence that the whipping effort took place after Democrats got whipped in an election they thought they had won. Trust them!

Nancy Pelosi attacked Republicans for demanding a delay in the individual mandate to pay for the “doc fix” compromise reached, an amendment from Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), who chairs Ways and Means. “Republicans should stop these reckless and destructive partisan tactics and work with Democrats,” Pelosi said — but Camp’s bill would do nothing that the top Democrat in the White House hasn’t done himself. Barack Obama has delayed the individual mandate for at least two more years, thanks to an expansion of the hardship exemption provisions that make it all but impossible to enforce.  The only difference here is that the delay would be legal, rather than an abuse of executive power.

This is why the Democratic strategy in 2014 is doomed to failure. They’ve continually lied about the impact of ObamaCare, from promising that people could keep their plans and doctors to lowered premiums to covering all of the uninsured. The “mend it don’t end it” messaging is just another shabby lie, only this one’s so threadbare and obvious that it’s going to anger rather than mollify.

In a related development, USA Today will publish an interview conducted by Web MD later today promoting the law he keeps attacking, at least in Pelosi’s view. The National Republican Campaign Committee has a microsite launching today called Political MD. The site allows you to deduce a diagnosis for Obama, Pelosi, or House Democrats by checking certain symptoms, such as “I keep losing special elections,” or “I keep lying to people about keeping their healthcare plan.” It’s an amusing fundraiser, and worth checking out.

Tags: Barack Obama, Dave Camp, fix it don't nix it, Medicare, mend it don't end it, Nancy Pelosi, ObamaCare, Steny Hoyer

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Source from: hotair

DidtheIRStargetconservativegroupsfortax

Did the IRS target conservative groups for tax audits?

posted at 9:21 am on February 12, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Did the IRS actions targeting conservative groups go beyond just hassling them over their tax-exempt applications? House Ways and Means chair Dave Camp (R-MI) declared yesterday that the IRS also targeted conservative groups with existing tax exemptions for audits, which would expand the boundaries of the IRS targeting scandal significantly:

On Tuesday, House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R., Mich.) said his committee’s continuing investigation has found that the IRS also singled out established conservative tax-exempt groups for audits.

“We now know that the IRS targeted not only right-leaning applicants, but also right-leaning groups that were already operating as 501(c)(4)s,” Mr. Camp said in a statement. “At Washington, DC’s direction, dozens of groups operating as 501(c)(4)s were flagged for IRS surveillance, including monitoring of the groups’ activities, websites and any other publicly available information. Of these groups, 83% were right-leaning. And of the groups the IRS selected for audit, 100% were right-leaning.”

Democrats objected to Camp’s declaration, calling it an election-year stunt:

“Instead of this prestigious committee using its broad jurisdiction to address critical issues that confront us, it has been consumed by a tireless effort by Republicans to find political scandal, regardless of what the truth holds, as they look toward the November election,” said Rep. Sander Levin (D., Mich.).

Jeff Dunetz has the entire Camp statement, which emphasizes that Treasury still has not provided “thousands” of documents relevant to the investigation into the targeting scandal:

It is important to note that the Committee has made these discoveries without even having the full universe of documents requested from the IRS – including thousands of documents from Lois Lerner that have not yet been provided. Simply put, our investigation is not yet over, the document collection is not yet complete, and I don’t believe the IRS or the FBI has interviewed a single victim. The notion that the Administration would rush forward with rules intended to remove these groups from the public forum, is simply unacceptable.

Under these proposed rules, activities such as candidate forums, get out the vote efforts, and voter registration would now be considered “political activity” for 501(c)(4) groups. It is notable to mention that these activities would not be considered political for 501(c)(3)s – who cannot engage in any political activity – or unions.

I have long made clear that this Committee will fight any and all efforts to restrict the rights of groups to organize, speak out and educate the public. The legislation before us today would prevent these rules from being implemented by this Administration for one year. This timeframe would allow Congress to finish our investigation and ensure that the agency processes what is already a record number of public comments – more than 23,000 so far – so that the IRS and Treasury can really get to the merits of why these rules were formed.

Katie Pavlich highlights testimony from Cleta Mitchell, who represented one of the organizations claiming to have been targeted, who blasted the IRS and Treasury last week:

The legislation to delay the rule-making at IRS passed out of committee yesterday, 23-13, and should sail to approval in the House. It will probably have to get attached to other legislation for the Senate to pass it, as it’s unlikely that Harry Reid will allow a stand-alone vote on anything that limits executive power in this so-called “year of action” at the White House. Besides, Democrats will need all they help they can get in the midterms.

 

Tags: Dave Camp, House Ways and Means Committee, IRS, scandal, targeting

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Source from: hotair