A Treasury inspector general will likely conclude its search for former IRS official Lois Lerner’s missing emails “in the next several weeks,” John Koskinen, the agency’s commissioner, said Thursday.
{mosads}Once Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration is finished, the Senate Finance Committee will be able to put the final touches on its investigation into the IRS’s singling out of Tea Party groups, something Koskinen said he hoped to see early in 2015.
“The only part left to be done is to figure out how many if any emails can they find and that are reproducible,” Koskinen told reporters at a news conference.
“At that point, with any luck at all, we’ll run everything to ground,” Koskinen added about the release of congressional reports.
The Treasury inspector general told lawmakers in November that they had recovered data that could contain emails to and from Lerner, the IRS official at the center of the agency’s Tea Party controversy.
The IRS said this summer that Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011, leaving the agency unable to find an untold number of her emails. The IRS also said it recycled tapes backing up those emails.
On Thursday, Koskinen also pushed back on reports that suggested the IRS could’ve done more on its own to recover the emails, pointing out that the agency had given the recycled tapes to the inspector general’s office.
“They’ve been at it for five months, with experts within the government and forensic people outside the government and still haven’t been able to produce the emails,” Koskinen said, adding that he didn’t know how many Lerner documents the watchdog would be able to find.
“They’ve got a line of sight to them,” Koskinen would only say.
Finance Committee aides have said that the panel was almost done with its report when it found out that Lerner’s emails couldn’t be found.
The missing emails gave a new spark to GOP investigations into the IRS, which first kicked off in May 2013, and also led to lawsuits against the agency.