#IRS: Delaware officials suddenly can’t find records Congress wants
**Posted by Phineas
Hey, remember Christine O’ Donnell? She was one of the more… “interesting” candidates to run in the 2010 “Tea Party wave” election, losing eventually to Chris “Bearded Marxist” Coons. A few days ago, it came out that O’Donnell, the same day she announced her candidacy for that race, the IRS hit her with a “mistaken” lien:
That same day, the IRS put a tax lien in her name on a house she no longer owned, arguing that O’Donnell owed the government $12,000, according to Grassley’s office.
O’Donnell told [Senator Charles] Grassley’s office that she provided the IRS with documents needed to clear her tax record “four or five times, and they kept getting ‘lost,’” the aide said.
The IRS later said it had made a mistake, which the agency said was the result of a computer glitch, and removed the lien.
The lien is significant because O’Donnell’s opponents cited it as evidence that she was financially irresponsible even though she espoused financial stability for the federal government.
I remember that incident with the lien; it became a significant part of the argument on the Right about whether O’Donnell was or wasn’t a total flake. Now it looks like she may have been “investigated” by state tax officials in her heavily Democratic state inappropriately accessing her federal tax records. This has caught the eye (and ire) of Senator Grassley (R-IA), who wants to see Delaware’s paperwork on this case.
And yet, now —O! What a coincidence!!— Delaware just can’t find those records:
Delaware state officials have told Congress that they likely destroyed the computer records that would show when and how often they accessed Christine O’Donnell’s personal tax records and acknowledged that a newspaper article was used as the sole justification for snooping into the former GOP Senate candidate’s tax history.
The revelations to Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office came Tuesday as the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, the government’s chief watchdog for the Internal Revenue Service, formally reopened its investigation into the matter by re-interviewing Ms. O’Donnell.
O’Donnell claims the state access to her records occurred on March 9th, 2010, a date given to her by the Treasury official who alerted her to the breach. Delaware says it was late March, and only after they’d seen the newspaper item (that alleged no wrongdoing on her part), but, gosh, they can’t find the records to prove their claim, so we’ll just have to take their word for it…
There’s no evidence (yet) that the Delaware Division of Revenue was part of the “inadvertent” smear of O’Donnell, but consider the situation in 2010: Riding a tidal wave of Tea Party support, Republicans were making a serious effort to take back Congress from the Democrats. Delaware was one of several states that could have been crucial to gaining control of the Senate. How convenient for the Democrats, then, was it that IRS hits her with a lien that guts her claims of fiscal responsibility, making her campaign in a Democratic state that much more difficult? Sure, they admitted the mistake, later, but the damage by that time was done.
And what were state officials doing digging at whim in her federal records? Perhaps a fishing expedition to look for more dirt, trying to do their part to help the national “party of government?” We don’t know, because they’ve destroyed records that could answer a few questions.
But it sure stinks.
(Crossposted at Public Secrets)