IRS Hard Drive Crash

Floor Speech

Mr. DeSANTIS. Mr. Speaker, the American people are not buying what the IRS is selling re these lost emails.

They want us to believe that within 10 days of Dave Camp requesting emails from the IRS, Lois Lerner's hard drive just happened to crash; her emails are gone and unrecoverable.

Now, what are the odds that the IRS is telling the truth? My friend, colleague, and MIT grad Thomas Massie provided me the following calculations:

Using the IRS's own figures, the chance that a hard drive would crash on any given day is 0.01 percent. So, over a 10-day period, the odds are basically 1 in 1,000 that your hard drive would crash. But here's the thing: only 10 percent of hard drive crashes result in having data and emails that are completely unrecoverable. So if you multiply those probabilities out, the odds that the IRS is telling the truth is one one-hundredth of 1 percent.

Now, if you, as a taxpayer, provided the IRS with an explanation that was that improbable, how long do you think it would take them to laugh in your face and hold you accountable? So the question we have, Mr. Speaker, is: Why should we accept such an improbable explanation from the IRS?

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