6 ms·

IRS claims to have lost 2 years of Director's emails

113 points by MrZongle2 12y ago

geetee 12y ago
Rather convenient? I would love to see how they manage their IT resources.
- mkempe 12y ago
  A Convenient "Truth"?
- Vekz 12y ago
  Well if their IT department is anything like the Healthcare.gov initial team, or other government agencies. What I've heard from Code For America. This is totally realistic.
  - interstitial 12y ago
    Have no back-ups whatsoever over a 2 year span is believable?
    - meepmorp 12y ago
      All the email at the IRS appears to live only on people's workstations in any permanent sense. For those downvoting, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891622
      - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
        So IRS don't back up directors workstation data?
        meepmorp 12y ago
        Apparently not. But they're also not bothering to archive email data at the server. Maybe it's the time I've spent in corporate environments, but losing data due to shitty IT management seems very plausible to me.
        pbhjpbhj 12y ago
        It doesn't seem _im_plausible for backups to have failed, or for recovery not to work or whatever. But, the other day I was working in a pottery studio with a ~8yo laptop as the only computer and they have offsite, encrypted, incremental backups of user data ... now it may not work correctly when it's needed (though it's been tested) ... but I'd kinda expect the USA's IRS to be slightly ahead of a micro-business working in arts-and-crafts as far as data security/recovery goes. 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.
    - lukeschlather 12y ago
      Most corporations have policies requiring emails be deleted after 3-12 months. I'd be more surprised if you told me they had backups from 3 years ago.
- blakeja 12y ago
  I have pretty extensive experience with government email systems and you can bet "poorly". So I would not be surprised if their entire email infrastructure is horribly out of date (think Exchange 2000). That said, government organizations tend to have good backups, retention, offsite storage of tapes via some service like Iron Mountain, etc. So yea, I agree, I am not buying it either.
- reitzensteinm 12y ago
  To see whether something is amiss statistically, we'd have to also check whether data of no consequence goes missing at the same frequency. 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.
  - rickhanlonii 12y ago
    Seems like an application of Hanlon's Razor[1], with an important extension: > 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. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
    - chc 12y ago
      You may as well just say "Always attribute everything to malice whenever possible." Hanlon's razor is only necessary when both stupidity and malice are plausible explanations, so your "exception" applies 100% of the time. By this philosophy, we must always attribute deeds to malice whether or not they can be adequately explained by stupidity, because even when mere stupidity is sufficient, we must still read in malice.
    - Crito 12y ago
      I'm a fan of Gray's Law: "Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice" 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.
- stretchwithme 12y ago
  Their resources are managed, it seems to me, to maximize the number of employees required. 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.
brentjanderson 12y ago
Wonder if the NSA can provide copies... ;)
- newman8r 12y ago
  I came here to post this joke. damn, damn, damn!
javert 12y ago
The IRS is a violation of individual rights and should be dismantled. It is not in anyone's true self-interest. People who are actually pursuing their own self-interest are hurt by it, only those that are not receive the "benefits" of it.
- interstitial 12y ago
  You say that now, but let's mix in some gender and identity politics and everyone will be agreeing it was an "honest" mistake.
  - ossreality 12y ago
    what the fuck are you talking about?
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  How you plan on funding the army? Pillage?
  - dnautics 12y ago
    could use corporate taxes. Note the top poster said "individual rights".
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      Hey, companies are people too.
      - dnautics 12y ago
        companies are most certainly people; corporations are not. Don't like corporate taxes? Do business as a partnership. 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.
  - 12y ago
interstitial 12y ago
HN is going to have trouble with this one: The techno-utopianism clashes with messianic politics of the chosen one.
smoorman1024 12y ago
Does anyone have expertise on whether there are any regulations on proper storage of government data? Does anyone know how an agency like the IRS would store their company email and if their claim is a feasible possibility?
- mkempe 12y ago
  Simple test: Has any other IRS employee lost all their email messages covering the exact same period?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- SAI_Peregrinus 12y ago
  Yes, retention of records is mandatory due to the Federal Records Act. The IRS should store their e-mail on the server, and use IMAP, MS Exchange, or similar. Failure to properly store records is illegal, and not using a proper mailserver configuration is extremely convenient incompetence. It's so convenient, and so high a degree of incompetence, that it looks very much like willful destruction of evidence.
- blakeja 12y ago
  I do have direct and extensive experience with government email systems. Caveat, mostly with other agencies but a pretty wide variety of them. Post 9/11 there were broad government initiatives to ensure systems like this were definitely backed up, backups stored offsite and usually along with some type of COOP initiative on top of all that. Maybe the IRS did not participate in that initiative, but I highly doubt it. That they "lost" this data is highly unlikely in my book.
- tendom 12y ago
  Records and retention is a large part of my current project. It permeates even the lowest levels, and it's practically impossible for the narrative to occur. I say practically impossible, because there is always some way some idiot can screw up big enough that this happens, but this narrative didn't happen. I'd stake 3 digits on it.
eplanit 12y ago
I can't decide if this smacks more of Iran-Contra or of Nixon. C'mon, the excuse of 'irretrievable' emails has been nonsense for some decades: http://articles.latimes.com/1987-08-10/business/fi-58_1_computer-files http://articles.latimes.com/1987-08-10/business/fi-58_1_comp...
TallGuyShort 12y ago
And yet if I "lost" 2 years of financial records...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- mediahack 12y ago
  ^^
- omilu 12y ago
  slow clap
- throwaway5752 12y ago
  Then you would probably try to piece together your tax liability through indirect methods, completely analogous to what they did here to recover the emails. What did you expect they'd do? 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.
fleitz 12y ago
Should be easy to fix, criminally charge those involved with obstruction of justice, declare it an issue of national security and request that the NSA provide these emails. Where are the drives, where are the backups? Why haven't the drives been sent to 3rd parties for extraction including reading platters directly.
- lsh123 12y ago
  I like the idea but in the last 5-6 years it feels the government is putting itself completely above the law. IRS-gate, Solyndra-gate, Benghazi-gate, ... It just doesn't stop: the Administration lies again and again but nobody get prosecuted for that.
- meepmorp 12y ago
  This appears to have been an individual workstation (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891622), and the problem seems to have occurred in 2011, before this became a political issue. It's possible that nobody thought that it was an important enough problem to warrant sending the disks out for 3rd party forensics.
  - fleitz 12y ago
    I find it difficult to believe that an organization that advocates keeping coffee receipts for 7 years wouldn't have an email archiving solution in place.
MaggieL 12y ago
The most interesting claim is that only email from outside the agency has been "lost".
- cleverjake 12y ago
  well, considering they are claiming its only emails from the director, any email sent to her from inside would be available as a sent email from that person.
  - BrandonMarc 12y ago
    True ... if you know who was sending her email. And then we found out the White House had created hundreds of "fake" email accounts with names belonging to no actual human working in the White House ...
meepmorp 12y ago
I've seen a fair number of comments assuming malfeasance here, so I'm just gonna note an actual news article about this. From http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=321783982 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3217839... > 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.
- protomyth 12y ago
  They waited until Friday when the President is out of town and didn't mention this problem when the original document requests went out. I will look up the exact rules when I get back to work, but I do believe they have violated the e-mail handling rules. It's a fine coverup since what is the recourse? It's worked before, so why not now?
  - meepmorp 12y ago
    > They waited until Friday when the President is out of town and didn't mention this problem when the original document requests went out. 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.
tendom 12y ago
Bullshit.
lsh123 12y ago
And in the same time, IRS managed to give taxpayer data to FBI. Of course some very specific taxpayers have been included in the data dump: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/irs-gave-fbi-1-1-million-pages-of-taxpayer-data-to-encourage-prosecution-of-conservatives.php http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/irs-gave-fbi-1...
- jd75 12y ago
  They targeted progressive groups to a greater extent, based on the information we have. http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/04/23/3429722/irs-records-tea-party/ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/04/23/3429722/irs-rec...
noonespecial 12y ago
If one does one's job so poorly that no one can tell if one engaged in criminal activity while doing it or not, shouldn't that be grounds for permanent removal from government service? It would only take a handful of examples and this stuff would go away.
tvanantwerp 12y ago
At least people might honestly believe Lerner and the IRS lost 2 years of email. That level of incompetence is expected of bureaucrats, and it's harder to prove misconduct than if you hid communications through an alias like Lisa Jackson at the EPA did.
dueprocess 12y ago
The NSA will have a copy. Ask them.
monochr 12y ago
Republican logic: Demand the strictest most penny pinching policies from the IRS while you are defunding them[1]. Complain when said defunding affects one of your pet issues because they can't afford a central server and store every email on local machines [2]. 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-funding/ http://www.taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/2012-Annual-Report/irs-f... [2] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=321783982 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3217839...
- johngalt 12y ago
  Is the 'us vs them' attitude really so strong in your mind? Do you think it's perfectly reasonable for an organization that spends $1.5billion on IT to be unable to retain their directors email? I can't help but think that your opinion would be different if this was email between oil executives.
  - monochr 12y ago
    "Do you think it's perfectly reasonable for an organization that spends $1.5billion on IT to be unable to retain their directors email?" 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.
    - johngalt 12y ago
      Surely organizations will always point to a lack of funding in response to a lack of performance. But I find it odd that they were certainly able to spare the time and budget to target opposition groups. Yet nothing was in the budget to keep any record of their actions.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
imjustsaying 12y ago
There's at least two clear incentives here. 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.
xirdstl 12y ago
It is interesting to see the responses both ways here: those who think there is malfeasance and those who don't, both with various reasonings. It would be more interesting to see the same posts next to the author's political leaning. i.e. how many people have an opinion that reflects something outside their own inherit political bias.
itbeho 12y ago
Rather than take a political side in this, I'd rather look at it pragmatically. If the IRS expects us to keep proper records, then they should set the example for us to follow.
exabrial 12y ago
You know, as a matter of fact... I don't recall working the last two years. I also lost all of my tax records. That's not a problem right?
protomyth 12y ago
And here are the IRS's own standards for e-mail: http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax6QGmKhRwo&feature=youtu.be
BrandonMarc 12y ago
How many businesses are required to store, archive, and always have ready access to email for "compliance" reasons (i.e. by law they have to, laws which are enforced by guns)? If the IRS doesn't have to follow the same rules, well that's very interesting. 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?

113 points by MrZongle2 12y ago

geetee 12y ago

Rather convenient? I would love to see how they manage their IT resources.

mkempe 12y ago
A Convenient "Truth"?
Vekz 12y ago
Well if their IT department is anything like the Healthcare.gov initial team, or other government agencies. What I've heard from Code For America. This is totally realistic.
- interstitial 12y ago
  Have no back-ups whatsoever over a 2 year span is believable?
  - meepmorp 12y ago
    All the email at the IRS appears to live only on people's workstations in any permanent sense. For those downvoting, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891622
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      So IRS don't back up directors workstation data?
      - meepmorp 12y ago
        Apparently not. But they're also not bothering to archive email data at the server. Maybe it's the time I've spent in corporate environments, but losing data due to shitty IT management seems very plausible to me.
        pbhjpbhj 12y ago
        It doesn't seem _im_plausible for backups to have failed, or for recovery not to work or whatever. But, the other day I was working in a pottery studio with a ~8yo laptop as the only computer and they have offsite, encrypted, incremental backups of user data ... now it may not work correctly when it's needed (though it's been tested) ... but I'd kinda expect the USA's IRS to be slightly ahead of a micro-business working in arts-and-crafts as far as data security/recovery goes. 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.
  - lukeschlather 12y ago
    Most corporations have policies requiring emails be deleted after 3-12 months. I'd be more surprised if you told me they had backups from 3 years ago.
blakeja 12y ago
I have pretty extensive experience with government email systems and you can bet "poorly". So I would not be surprised if their entire email infrastructure is horribly out of date (think Exchange 2000). That said, government organizations tend to have good backups, retention, offsite storage of tapes via some service like Iron Mountain, etc. So yea, I agree, I am not buying it either.
reitzensteinm 12y ago
To see whether something is amiss statistically, we'd have to also check whether data of no consequence goes missing at the same frequency. 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.
- rickhanlonii 12y ago
  Seems like an application of Hanlon's Razor[1], with an important extension: > 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. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
  - chc 12y ago
    You may as well just say "Always attribute everything to malice whenever possible." Hanlon's razor is only necessary when both stupidity and malice are plausible explanations, so your "exception" applies 100% of the time. By this philosophy, we must always attribute deeds to malice whether or not they can be adequately explained by stupidity, because even when mere stupidity is sufficient, we must still read in malice.
  - Crito 12y ago
    I'm a fan of Gray's Law: "Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice" 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.
stretchwithme 12y ago
Their resources are managed, it seems to me, to maximize the number of employees required. 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.

brentjanderson 12y ago

Wonder if the NSA can provide copies... ;)

newman8r 12y ago
I came here to post this joke. damn, damn, damn!

javert 12y ago

The IRS is a violation of individual rights and should be dismantled. It is not in anyone's true self-interest. People who are actually pursuing their own self-interest are hurt by it, only those that are not receive the "benefits" of it.

interstitial 12y ago
You say that now, but let's mix in some gender and identity politics and everyone will be agreeing it was an "honest" mistake.
- ossreality 12y ago
  what the fuck are you talking about?
lotsofmangos 12y ago
How you plan on funding the army? Pillage?
- dnautics 12y ago
  could use corporate taxes. Note the top poster said "individual rights".
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    Hey, companies are people too.
    - dnautics 12y ago
      companies are most certainly people; corporations are not. Don't like corporate taxes? Do business as a partnership. 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.
- 12y ago

interstitial 12y ago

HN is going to have trouble with this one: The techno-utopianism clashes with messianic politics of the chosen one.

smoorman1024 12y ago

Does anyone have expertise on whether there are any regulations on proper storage of government data? Does anyone know how an agency like the IRS would store their company email and if their claim is a feasible possibility?

mkempe 12y ago
Simple test: Has any other IRS employee lost all their email messages covering the exact same period?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
SAI_Peregrinus 12y ago
Yes, retention of records is mandatory due to the Federal Records Act. The IRS should store their e-mail on the server, and use IMAP, MS Exchange, or similar. Failure to properly store records is illegal, and not using a proper mailserver configuration is extremely convenient incompetence. It's so convenient, and so high a degree of incompetence, that it looks very much like willful destruction of evidence.
blakeja 12y ago
I do have direct and extensive experience with government email systems. Caveat, mostly with other agencies but a pretty wide variety of them. Post 9/11 there were broad government initiatives to ensure systems like this were definitely backed up, backups stored offsite and usually along with some type of COOP initiative on top of all that. Maybe the IRS did not participate in that initiative, but I highly doubt it. That they "lost" this data is highly unlikely in my book.
tendom 12y ago
Records and retention is a large part of my current project. It permeates even the lowest levels, and it's practically impossible for the narrative to occur. I say practically impossible, because there is always some way some idiot can screw up big enough that this happens, but this narrative didn't happen. I'd stake 3 digits on it.

eplanit 12y ago

I can't decide if this smacks more of Iran-Contra or of Nixon. C'mon, the excuse of 'irretrievable' emails has been nonsense for some decades: http://articles.latimes.com/1987-08-10/business/fi-58_1_computer-files http://articles.latimes.com/1987-08-10/business/fi-58_1_comp...

TallGuyShort 12y ago

And yet if I "lost" 2 years of financial records...

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mediahack 12y ago
^^
omilu 12y ago
slow clap
throwaway5752 12y ago
Then you would probably try to piece together your tax liability through indirect methods, completely analogous to what they did here to recover the emails. What did you expect they'd do? 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.

fleitz 12y ago

Should be easy to fix, criminally charge those involved with obstruction of justice, declare it an issue of national security and request that the NSA provide these emails. Where are the drives, where are the backups? Why haven't the drives been sent to 3rd parties for extraction including reading platters directly.

lsh123 12y ago
I like the idea but in the last 5-6 years it feels the government is putting itself completely above the law. IRS-gate, Solyndra-gate, Benghazi-gate, ... It just doesn't stop: the Administration lies again and again but nobody get prosecuted for that.
meepmorp 12y ago
This appears to have been an individual workstation (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891622), and the problem seems to have occurred in 2011, before this became a political issue. It's possible that nobody thought that it was an important enough problem to warrant sending the disks out for 3rd party forensics.
- fleitz 12y ago
  I find it difficult to believe that an organization that advocates keeping coffee receipts for 7 years wouldn't have an email archiving solution in place.

MaggieL 12y ago

The most interesting claim is that only email from outside the agency has been "lost".

cleverjake 12y ago
well, considering they are claiming its only emails from the director, any email sent to her from inside would be available as a sent email from that person.
- BrandonMarc 12y ago
  True ... if you know who was sending her email. And then we found out the White House had created hundreds of "fake" email accounts with names belonging to no actual human working in the White House ...

meepmorp 12y ago

I've seen a fair number of comments assuming malfeasance here, so I'm just gonna note an actual news article about this. From http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=321783982 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3217839... > 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.

protomyth 12y ago
They waited until Friday when the President is out of town and didn't mention this problem when the original document requests went out. I will look up the exact rules when I get back to work, but I do believe they have violated the e-mail handling rules. It's a fine coverup since what is the recourse? It's worked before, so why not now?
- meepmorp 12y ago
  > They waited until Friday when the President is out of town and didn't mention this problem when the original document requests went out. 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.

tendom 12y ago

Bullshit.

lsh123 12y ago

And in the same time, IRS managed to give taxpayer data to FBI. Of course some very specific taxpayers have been included in the data dump: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/irs-gave-fbi-1-1-million-pages-of-taxpayer-data-to-encourage-prosecution-of-conservatives.php http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/irs-gave-fbi-1...

jd75 12y ago
They targeted progressive groups to a greater extent, based on the information we have. http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/04/23/3429722/irs-records-tea-party/ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/04/23/3429722/irs-rec...

noonespecial 12y ago

If one does one's job so poorly that no one can tell if one engaged in criminal activity while doing it or not, shouldn't that be grounds for permanent removal from government service? It would only take a handful of examples and this stuff would go away.

tvanantwerp 12y ago

At least people might honestly believe Lerner and the IRS lost 2 years of email. That level of incompetence is expected of bureaucrats, and it's harder to prove misconduct than if you hid communications through an alias like Lisa Jackson at the EPA did.

dueprocess 12y ago

The NSA will have a copy. Ask them.

monochr 12y ago

Republican logic: Demand the strictest most penny pinching policies from the IRS while you are defunding them[1]. Complain when said defunding affects one of your pet issues because they can't afford a central server and store every email on local machines [2]. 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-funding/ http://www.taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/2012-Annual-Report/irs-f... [2] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=321783982 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3217839...

johngalt 12y ago
Is the 'us vs them' attitude really so strong in your mind? Do you think it's perfectly reasonable for an organization that spends $1.5billion on IT to be unable to retain their directors email? I can't help but think that your opinion would be different if this was email between oil executives.
- monochr 12y ago
  "Do you think it's perfectly reasonable for an organization that spends $1.5billion on IT to be unable to retain their directors email?" 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.
  - johngalt 12y ago
    Surely organizations will always point to a lack of funding in response to a lack of performance. But I find it odd that they were certainly able to spare the time and budget to target opposition groups. Yet nothing was in the budget to keep any record of their actions.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

imjustsaying 12y ago

There's at least two clear incentives here. 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.

xirdstl 12y ago

It is interesting to see the responses both ways here: those who think there is malfeasance and those who don't, both with various reasonings. It would be more interesting to see the same posts next to the author's political leaning. i.e. how many people have an opinion that reflects something outside their own inherit political bias.

itbeho 12y ago

Rather than take a political side in this, I'd rather look at it pragmatically. If the IRS expects us to keep proper records, then they should set the example for us to follow.

exabrial 12y ago

You know, as a matter of fact... I don't recall working the last two years. I also lost all of my tax records. That's not a problem right?

protomyth 12y ago

And here are the IRS's own standards for e-mail: http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax6QGmKhRwo&feature=youtu.be

BrandonMarc 12y ago

How many businesses are required to store, archive, and always have ready access to email for "compliance" reasons (i.e. by law they have to, laws which are enforced by guns)? If the IRS doesn't have to follow the same rules, well that's very interesting. 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?