[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 100 (Wednesday, June 25, 2014)]
[House]
[Page H5734]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          IRS HARD DRIVE CRASH

  (Mr. DeSANTIS asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute.)
  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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