Do I even need to say it? Another lie. Either the drive was removed and dropped from a height of more than 20 feet or someone had to have opened it and "touched" a platter.
These arseholes at the IRS aren't even good liars.
Compared to the politicians of the 60s to 80s they are third rate criminals.
Actually, a drive can experience a "head crash" that can result in a loss of some data. The heads that read the data are "flying" above the surface of the disks at a height of only a few thousandths of an inch. If the disk is subject to a hard jolt while the disk is spinning, then heads can crash onto the surface of the disk. The area where the heads contact the disk are damaged and the data stored there can be lost. If the damaged area contains part of the OS, the system may be unable to boot.
However, it would take a lot of head crashes to lose a significant amount of data from the drive. And as long as the drive will still spin up, you can place the drive into another system, do a bit-by-bit copy of the drive onto a new drive, and then recover the data from the undamaged areas of the drive.