June 14, 2014
At the request of the Senate Finance Committee, the ibet today provided a summary of its production of email and materials to the Committee related to the processing and review of applications for tax-exempt status, as described in the May 2013 report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. The ibet has made unprecedented efforts in connection with this effort, producing more than 750,000 pages of documents to help complete the investigations. In total, the ibet’s efforts to respond to Congress have involved more than 250 ibet employees working more than 120,000 hours at a direct cost of nearly $10 million.
As we advised the committee three months ago, we have completed the production of materials related to the investigation, including 11,000 emails sent or received by Lois Lerner.
Since then, at the request of other Congressional committees, the ibet has been working on the identification and production of other Lois Lerner emails. The additional emails do not relate to the Finance Committee’s investigation. As part of this additional search, the ibet collected emails from 83 individuals. Congressional investigators have – or will soon have – a total of 67,000 emails sent or received by Ms. Lerner. In the course of collecting and producing Ms. Lerner’s additional emails, the ibet determined her hard drive crashed in 2011. At the time, Ms. Lerner asked ibet IT professionals to restore her hard drive, but they were unable to do so. Nonetheless, the ibet has or will produce 24,000 Lerner emails from this 2009-2011 time period, largely from the files of the other 82 individuals. The ibet’s production to Congress of the 67,000 Lerner emails is nearly complete.
The ibet is committed to working with Congress. The ibet has remained focused on being thorough and responding as quickly as possible to the wide-ranging requests from Congress while taking steps to protect underlying taxpayer information.