If the IRS or the associated company were some private corp Schmucks accused of even mid level crime wrong doing government agencies including the FBI would have raided them with a SWAT Team. They then would have escorted all persons from the business and taken all computers and records as evidence. The Oops or our computer crashed nonsense would have soon turned into well, well, we have recovered all of your data via forensics as evidence.
Congress needs to slip a little provision into some bill that nobody will read before passing, saying that any excuse that allows government to evade legal responsibilities must also allow everybody else to evade legal responsibilities. So if the IRS can say the dog ate their hard drive, so can every business or individual in America. No more W-2’s, etc. It all got eaten by the hard drive crash and is irretrievable...
And I think the House should immediately add to any budget that the IRS budget is to be spent paying only minimum-wage to anybody who works there, that Lois Lerner’s retirement income (based on the government records of payouts to her, not dependent on her reporting whatsoever) shall be taxed at 100% (like they did with the AIG? execs at one point), and the money brought in by her taxes shall be used to buy and maintain “The Lois Lerner Memorial FU”, a copy machine that automatically prints every incoming and outgoing email at the IRS.