IRS claims to have lost 2 years of Director's emails
waysandmeans.house.gov
waysandmeans.house.gov
> The IRS said technicians went to great lengths trying to recover data from Lerner's computer in 2011. In emails provided by the IRS, technicians said they sent the computer to a forensic lab run by the agency's criminal investigations unit. But to no avail.
> The IRS was able to generate 24,000 Lerner emails from the 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. The agency said it pieced together the emails from the computers of 82 other IRS employees.
So, reading between the lines here, it looks like the IRS doesn't archive email at the server level, and any copies of mail were retrieved from individual workstations.
I don't see conspiracy here. I see incompetent IT processes and a lack of mandated data retention policies. Maybe I'm predisposed to employ Hanlon's razor, but that's only because I've found it to be the best explanation for most situations like this. If it was a coverup, it's a terrible one.
Having worked in government for well over a decade now, I can tell you that this is undoubtedly the case. That is not to say all departments have poor practices, but on the whole there is no standardization and each organization does things differently.
I have worked in offices that have NO server archive and everyone relies on PST's, and others where there are server archives but they are limited to 500MB or something small and they just start deleting items by date.
It's common for the contractor to own all the IT equipment and just lease it to the government. What happens when it's time to change contracts and every single computer, phone, printer has to be replaced. There is no possibility for competitive bidding in the wake of that.
It's an awful system, but a lot of it has to do how government awards IT contracts and how quickly they are out of date.
It's a fine coverup since what is the recourse? It's worked before, so why not now?
Yes, Friday news dumps are shitty. They're also standard practice in politics. The fact that it wasn't mentioned in the original document requests, though, might just be an extension of the aforementioned incompetence.
> It's a fine coverup since what is the recourse? It's worked before, so why not now?
What's worked before? Failing to keep the purported coverup secret and also turning over a large number of the purportedly destroyed documents because they were recoverable from other sources?
If you're looking to see intentional bad behavior, fine. But this kind of digital stupidity happens all over. I've no doubt that corporate America is full of Exchange implementations with small mailbox limits and a reliance on PST files that are stored locally.
Losing documents in all the other Congressional requests the last couple of years. Hell, a unrelated FOIA request produced documents for a news org that weren't given to the committee. There are no real consequences so why worry. If there was a problem and they didn't mention it in the original request then it is very close to criminal. I do believe the Official Records Act has been grossly violated at this point.
The point being the IRS is supposed to be apolitical.
Lois Lerner pleaded the fifth couple of months back. She is accused of harassing tea party donors.
Lois Lerner in 2011: Receiving a Thick Questionnaire from the IRS Is a "Behavior Changer"
http://patterico.com/2013/07/10/lois-lerner-in-2011-receivin...
Say, if you claimed $1000 in charitable donations but lost the receipts and got audited, you'd probably be able to go to the organization you donated to get their records. If they couldn't produce them, you'd probably have the deduction disallowed and have to pay back taxes + interest.
If you're going to try to glibly score points, chose a better example.
It would only take a handful of examples and this stuff would go away.
http://articles.latimes.com/1987-08-10/business/fi-58_1_comp...
If organizations are really bad at storing data, but it only gets tested with important queries, incompetence is going to look a lot like malice (I make no case for which this particular incident is).
Of course, I've painted somewhat of a false dichotomy. If you are required by policy to retain email, doing so is unlikely to give you any benefit and may well cause severe political problems.
The most logical thing to do is severely understaff and underbudget the sysadmins responsible. Then, when the backups are needed, there's a significant chance they'll be nowhere to be found, and you've saved money in the process too.
That would be malicious incompetence, so to speak.
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, unless that stupidity is adequately explained by malice.
I'd like to coin this extension Hanlon's Exception.
That is to say, if you "fuck up" bad enough, why should society give a shit that you did not have malicious intent? Much like drunk driving, I think that this is a fine case for strict liability.
This discussion hearkens back to the current investigation into John Swallow, the former Attorney General of Utah who resigned less than a year into his term and is currently the subject of multiple investigations.
Swallow 'lost' over 1,700 emails from his time in office on his home computer. The state of Utah has spent over $100,000 to recover them (some successfully), see: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/57648883-78/swallow-sltrib...
I had to give them money once and they literally have different people to record a payment and another to look up your balance.
But they do give you the phone number that will get you to that other employee. You just go through the phone tree and you eventually get the person who can look up your balance.
Its the dumbest way to do things I've ever seen for an organization in the US.
For those downvoting, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891622
Maybe it's the time I've spent in corporate environments, but losing data due to shitty IT management seems very plausible to me.
If you told the IRS you couldn't file your reports because you'd lost user data they'd consider it criminal negligence, I imagine, that you'd not secured the data through backup. Sauce for the goose ...
Data loss where there's no backup system even in place sounds like reason to fire all the IT managers in systems like the IRS where the preservation/security of data is vital to proper function.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/irs-gave-fbi-1...
of note: section 1.10.3.2.3 (07-08-2011) Emails as Possible Federal Records
5. Please note that maintaining a copy of an email or its attachments within the IRS email MS Outlook application does not meet the requirements of maintaining an official record. Therefore, print and file email and its attachments if they are either permanent records or if they relate to a specific case.
[edit] a video of a committee meeting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax6QGmKhRwo&feature=youtu.be
That they "lost" this data is highly unlikely in my book.
What I wonder is, how do such people (Lerner, Holder, Obama) still have any credibility in the minds of those who vote for them?
(well, those who vote for them receive their information through filters, just like you and me, and so they'll probably never know that these hard drives, laptops, data, "disappeared")
Which leads to the follow-up question: how can we get this news to reach those who vote for these people, given they (or their filters) would avoid such a story in the first place?
Losing the evidence means the hole in Smaug's armor is temporarily patched for when it flies in to Laketown.
Secondly, losing the evidence means they get an innocuous selling point when they request a bigger budget to implement that arcane task of backing up files.
Where are the drives, where are the backups? Why haven't the drives been sent to 3rd parties for extraction including reading platters directly.
This is the same sort of stupidity that we see on parade every time they fight tooth and nail to get some borderline unconstitutional religious law passed only to the the fastest about face imaginable when they find out that "religion" doesn't main "only my religion" in law.
[1] http://www.taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/2012-Annual-Report/irs-f...
[2] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3217839...
You do realize that the IRS it budget is spent on trying to keep a database of every American running for ever on $5 a years per person? Email servers don't have anything to do with that. And having seem "cost cutting" measures in both government and industry the "non-essential" services like a centralized email server would be the first to go.
So yes, it is, you get the government you pay for.
Oh I thought for a second I was talking to a non-troll. My bad.
The income tax also has a secondary effect to generating revenue: it implements control and enables targeted abuse of undesirables with a big dossier of filing mistakes.
Of course corporations should enjoy freedom of speech, etc (because to curtail those necessarily curtails some individual's freedom), but do they get to vote? No.