Voting Station

Lois Lerner

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Bureaucrat

The Resume

    (October 12, 1950- )
    Birth name is Lois Gail Lerner
    Attorney; former US federal civil service employee
    Director of the Exempt Organizations Unit for the IRS (2005-13)
    Central figure to the 2013 IRS Targeting scandal
    Accused of targeting conservative/Tea Party-affiliated groups for additional scrutiny
    Put on paid administrative leave at the height of the scandal (May 2013)
    Formally resigned and retired from the IRS (Sept. 2013)

Why she might be annoying:

    She is a tax lawyer married to a tax lawyer.
    She was accused of destroying/withholding evidence pertinent to a Congressional probe.
    She was accused of enabling the IRS to either outright deny Right-wing organizations tax-exempt status as a means of nullifying their influence on the 2012 Presidential election.
    She was revealed to have had a second personal email account under the name 'Toby Miles' which she reportedly used to conduct IRS business.
    She was heard during a May 2013 conference call admitting, between 2010 and 2012, the IRS had used shortcut terms, like 'patriots' and 'Tea Party,' to identify tax exempt applicants for review (but claimed it wasn't partisan).
    She tried arguing that the scrutiny wasn't centralized but only came from a few rogue officials out of their Cincinnati office, but later reports revealed DC-based IRS officials had been more closely involved than she let on.
    She refused to testify to a Congressional committee about the tax exempt investigations by invoking the Fifth Amendment leading Congress to issue her with a contempt citation (2014).
    When her emails were subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee, IRS officials responded that her hard drive had crashed, causing some of her emails to be 'lost.'
    It was revealed that over 400 backup tapes of her emails had been erased over a year earlier after they were subpoenaed, although investigators had difficulty proving it was done 'to conceal evidence' (Jun. 2015).
    She was roundly criticized for her handling of the scandal, including by prominent left-wing figures like Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, and Chuck Todd.

Why she might not be annoying:

    Former colleagues described her as 'non partisan' and 'apolitical.'
    She earned her J.D. from the Western New England College of Law.
    She admitted, during an American Bar Association meeting, that the IRS had taken 'absolutely inappropriate' actions against conservative groups (albeit responding to a planted question).
    She may have been a scapegoat for higher officials within the IRS.
    A Department of Justice investigation, completed in 2015, although it found 'substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia,' found 'no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution' (Oct. 2015).
    The DOJ under President Trump declined a request from the Republican-led Ways & Means to reopen the investigation into her activity, outraging many supporters (Sept. 2017).

Credit: BoyWiththeGreenHair


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 10 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 70 Votes: 60.0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 104 Votes: 53.85% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 16 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 128 Votes: 52.34% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 140 Votes: 58.57% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 796 Votes: 61.06% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 221 Votes: 76.47% Annoying