According to Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), the IRS spent $12 million on an e-mail archive system that it never used. Because of that, Lois Lerner was never brought to justice for targeting conservative and Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status.
As The Daily Caller reports, soon after Lerner was in the hot seat and claiming she lost her e-mails, the IRS had the computer system installed to archive everything it could find. However, they never turned it on. On top of that, the tax agency broke federal procurement laws when they bought it:
The agency began paying for an email archive subscription in June 2014, while the Lerner scandal was unfolding. Lerner was declared in contempt of Congress that May. But while IRS officials were telling Congress they understood the importance of not losing official records, the new system sat unused.
A September 2016 government audit found that the expenditure “was made without first determining project infrastructure needs, integration requirements, business requirements, security and portal bandwidth, and whether the subscriptions were technologically feasible on the IRS enterprise.”
And officials also ignored their own agency’s regulations and likely broke rules “by not using full and open competition to purchase these subscriptions” and by using annual appropriations for something it didn’t use in that year.
With perfect comedic timing, the IRS’s chief information officer said, “We strongly disagree that the IRS wasted taxpayer dollars.”
Could have fooled the taxpayers.
Moreover, the IRS wasted hundreds of millions more on the software and server licenses that, again, THEY NEVER USED. As noted by The DC, in 2014, the IRS was quite behind technologically: still using Windows XP, paying staff to do what computers could do for much cheaper, and employing IRS programmers who could only type under 500 lines of code per month when a programmer from the private sector could do that every day.
There are so many levels of corruption in the IRS it isn’t funny.
This and many, many other weird and ridiculous federal expenditures can be read about in Sen. Flake’s Wastebook for January 2017.
