Henry Waxman wants response by Sept. 10.

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WASHINGTON — A Democratic House committee chairman renewed his demand that the Bush administration explain how millions of White House e-mails may have been lost, revealing for the first time that there was a daily audit of the message system.

Rep. Henry Waxman of California, head of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said White House officials had failed to provide answers for three months. In a letter to White House Counsel Fred Fielding, Waxman demanded a response by Sept. 10, including an internal report that analyzed the scope of the missing e-mails.

Waxman said members of his committee staff "have repeatedly requested that the White House provide this information without success." The White House has failed to identify the outside contractor that conducted daily audits of the e-mail system, he said.

The revelation that there were daily audits suggests that e-mails were destroyed, said Anne Weismann, general counsel of the nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sued the Bush administration in May over the missing e-mails.

"It's hard to imagine it could have been a technical problem," Weismann said in an interview. It is "incomprehensible that e-mail could go missing and it not be caught."

The White House Office of Administration hired the outside firm to conduct daily audits of its e-mail archiving system, yet its analysis found that the system failed to preserve e-mails on any given day, Waxman said.

The watchdog group said in its suit that about 5 million e-mails from March 2003 to October 2005 are missing, a possible violation of federal record-keeping laws. In an Aug. 21 filing in the lawsuit, the White House said the Office of Administration, which oversees the e-mail system, isn't subject to the nation's open-records law.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said officials are reviewing Waxman's request and "will respond expeditiously."