Republicans Demand Answers After IRS Destroys Over 30 Million Documents

Republican lawmakers have questions about why exactly over 3o million were destroyed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in March of 2021  according to Just the News. Representatives David Schweikert (R-AZ) and Jason Smith (R-MO) wrote a joint letter to the IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel asking for the memorandum behind the reasonings for this mass document shredding.

In an interview Representative Schweikert commented that “Let’s say, you know, it’s a couple years from now and you need to go back and say, ‘I need to get copies of what I filed.’ It doesn’t exist anymore…I need to make sure that we want to do an amended form or we want, you know, all sorts of things that these tax records are used for and they don’t exist anymore.”

In the Arizona lawmaker’s view, “We’ve never been able to get a satisfactory answer from the IRS of why this was done.. and is that policy that allowed it to happen? Is there a way to make sure this never happens again?” Schewikert revealed in the interview that “We’ve been told that [the destroyed documents] was mostly sort of residential, but that when you’re talking, you know, that many potentially millions of individual documents, we’re trying to get a much better understanding of what is it.”

The memo that the two asked for should reveal what exactly was destroyed and why. “This is one, we sort of wait till we get sort of the formal response back with a lot more explanation. Instead of an explanation saying, “Oh, we screwed up, we’re sorry.” It’s okay. You screwed up. You’re sorry. I understand that. Now walk us through what it was, why it was, and how we make sure this never happens again, and then also how do we indemnify all the taxpayers whose documents have now disappeared” said Schewikert.

Just the News observed that previous congressional requests for additional information on this matter were disregarded by the IRS. The IRS has long been a tool that has been employed against political dissents and enemies of the president dating back to 1930s under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As FDR’s own son said, “My father…may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution.”

The IRS has regularly been embroiled with similar scandals over the targeting of political undesirables. Indeed, one of the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon was over his use of the IRS through seeking “confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law.” The IRS was also weaponized under the Obama administration to notably go after conservative organizations. A certain individual named Jack Smith who later became Biden’s Special Counsel into Donald Trump was involved in some of the criminal wrongdoings of the IRS.