Whistleblower Office — Lee Martin, Director

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, I hereby request the following records:

I would like to obtain all emails sent to, from, or copied to Lee Martin, Director, from January 1, 2016 to Present Day containing at least one of the following non-case-sensitive key-strings: "expedited processing", "delayed processing", or "backlog".

You may ignore junk mail, spam, or newsletters.

The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 20 business days, as the statute requires.

Sincerely,

Taylor Amarel

To Whom It May Concern:

I wanted to follow up on the following Freedom of Information Act request, copied below, and originally submitted on July 3, 2019. Please let me know when I can expect to receive a response.

Thanks for your help, and let me know if further clarification is needed.

To Whom This May Concern,

I would like appeal this determination. Although certain text within the requested records may contain personal information, that is not adequate justification to withhold the records. Instead, the IRS is obligated to redact the personal information and grant partial releases.

I have requested email records of an government email account. Therefore, at an absolute minimum I should receive the email records that are partially redacted, because the email address and name of Lee Martin, Director are public information the IRS is not able to justify redacting that information. It is very unusual for an agency to issue a complete denial of email records because there is meta data, newsletters, inter/intra-agency correspondence, government memos, staff instructions, and other emails that do not contain personal information and even if those emails did contain personal information, the specific information must be redacted rather than the entire records. For example, it is widely recorded that Lee Martin has sent and received numerous emails regarding the IRS Whistleblower Program backlog, therefore those emails and subsequent responses and email chains are subject to disclosure and of significant public interest.

Furthermore, in FOIA Request F18113-0042, the IRS released email records of Lee Martin without making such overarching denial of records.

Therefore I respectfully request you redact any personal information and release the records as required by law.

I would also like to request the number of records (pages) that have satisfied the keyword search and the FOIA log for this request.

Thank you.

To Whom This May Concern,

I would like appeal this determination. Although certain text within the requested records may contain personal information, that is not adequate justification to withhold the records. Instead, the IRS is obligated to redact the personal information and grant partial releases.

I have requested email records of an government email account. Therefore, at an absolute minimum I should receive the email records that are partially redacted, because the email address and name of Lee Martin, Director are public information the IRS is not able to justify redacting that information. It is very unusual for an agency to issue a complete denial of email records because there is meta data, newsletters, inter/intra-agency correspondence, government memos, staff instructions, and other emails that do not contain personal information and even if those emails did contain personal information, the specific information must be redacted rather than the entire records. For example, it is widely recorded that Lee Martin has sent and received numerous emails regarding the IRS Whistleblower Program backlog, therefore those emails and subsequent responses and email chains are subject to disclosure and of significant public interest.

Furthermore, in FOIA Request F18113-0042, the IRS released email records of Lee Martin without making such overarching denial of records.

Therefore I respectfully request you redact any personal information and release the records as required by law.

I would also like to request the number of records (pages) that have satisfied the keyword search and the FOIA log for this request.

Thank you.