Web CPA, Senators Complain IRS is Stonewalling Inspector General:

A pair of U.S. senators has written to IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman and the heads of a dozen other federal agencies asking why they have erected roadblocks to investigative efforts of their agencies’ watchdogs, their inspectors general. …

In the IRS letter, they noted that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration had outlined a number of examples of being denied unrestricted and unfettered access to information from the IRS. TIGTA said that it had requested numerous funding, approval and management oversight documents that the IRS delayed providing. The IRS’s 2010 Business Systems Modernization Expenditure Plan was delayed three months, and its Integrated Financial System reports took two months to obtain.

TIGTA had also requested six months’ worth of e-mail messages for 167 IRS employees to evaluate whether they were complying with secure e-mail policies and procedures. “The IRS struggled to provide TIGTA with the required information, claiming resource concerns,” said the senators. To expedite the process, TIGTA agreed to reduce the scope of the request to a three-month period, but after a four-month wait, only 65 percent of the employee e-mails have been provided.

It also took 116 days for the IRS to complete a scanning project for TIGTA on a sample group of 20 databases, and another 42 days for the scan results to be shared with the database administrators so they could coordinate a review. TIGTA believed it would not have taken as long if the IRS had placed the necessary emphasis on the project.