IRS Claims One Victory in Court Battle Over Document Retrieval

The embattled team of internal document reviewers at the Internal Revenue Service received news of a courtroom victory this week in the two-year-old conflict with Congress and conservative legal groups seeking emails relating to the alleged political bias at the agency.

In a July 3 ruling addressing one of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act requests, District of Columbia District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan granted the IRS’ motion for summary dismissal, saying the agency’s document search within certain agency units had been adequate and rejecting the argument that a wider search might uncover evidence that individuals were audited by the IRS based on their nonprofit organizations’ applications for tax-exempt status as social welfare groups under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code.

 “The IRS argues that this incredible burden is especially undue because of the unlikelihood that anything responsive would be uncovered,” the ruling stated. “The IRS' other searches establish -- and Judicial Watch's evidence has not controverted -- that no individuals were referred for audit based upon information gleaned from a Section 501(c)(4) application. Therefore, it is speculation at best to say that there exist communications discussing decisions to audit an individual based upon 501(c)(4) applications. And it is well-established that ‘an agency is not required to expend its limited resources on searches for which it is clear at the outset that no search would produce the records sought.’ “

Judicial Watch, based on its other FOIA requests, has raised the possibility of coordination between the Justice Department, the FBI and former IRS executive Lois Lerner, on strategies for prosecution of politically oriented nonprofits, based on emails already turned over, with more coming under a another ruling by Judge Sullivan.

But the IRS argued that any search of the email accounts of its employees for communications that might pertain to a decision to select or not to select an individual for an audit based upon information in a 501(c)(4) application would require the search of 16,000 employee email accounts (in 442 different cities), which it considered burdensome.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told Government Executive on Thursday that the IRS “disingenuously narrowed the records it would look at, and unfortunately, the judge deferred to them as reasonable. It’s a ridiculous position by the IRS in that they searched a few databases where they knew nothing was likely to be, and given the allegation in our FOIA, they should have known to search other email situations and informal referrals.”

Judicial Watch is proceeding with additional FOIA requests, Fitton said. “Courts are often deferential to agencies here, so we have to think of other ways to skin the cat,” he said.

(Image via  sergign / Shutterstock.com)