The IRS admitted earlier this month that it once again deleted evidence from a hard drive after a federal judge ordered the data to be preserved, sparking further outrage from Republican lawmakers, reported legal news outlet Law 360.
"On January 15, 2015, the Internal Revenue Service disclosed that it had erased an IRS employee's hard drive in April 2015, destroying documents covered by a federal district court's preservation order," Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, wrote in a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, dated Jan. 21.
Last year, a federal judge issued a preservation order to the IRS after Microsoft filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit after the IRS allegedly hired an outside firm to help audit the technology firm and then failed to hand over relevant documents after requested by a FOIA.
The order covered the hard drive Samuel Maruca, the former director of transfer pricing operations at the IRS Large Business and International Division, who participated in the hiring of the outside law firm, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, according to The Daily Caller.
"It is stunning to see that the IRS still does not take responsible care to preserve documents that it is legally required to protect," the lawmakers wrote. "It is not apparent that the IRS has not solved the management problems that have led once again to the destruction of documents in contravention of its legal obligations."
It's not the first time that the IRS has "accidentally" erased critical information that was under preservation order, noted Chaffetz and Jordan. In March 2014, during investigations into the agency's targeting of conservative groups, the IRS destroyed 422 email backup tapes containing as many as 24,000 messages sent or received by Lois Lerner, the former director of the IRS' Exempt Organizations Division who oversaw the targeting operation. Even further, the IRS claims that computer crashes caused it to lose emails from around 20 employees, many who were linked to the targeting scandal, according to a separate Daily Caller report.
"The destruction of evidence subject to preservation orders and subpoenas has been an ongoing problem under your leadership at the IRS," the lawmakers wrote.
Chaffetz and Jordan, citing authority afforded to the House oversight committee under House Rule X that allows them to at "any time" investigate "any matter," requested that the IRS produce the following documents by Jan. 27, 2016:
