Imagine If You Were Called For An IRS Audit And You Only Brought Pictures Of Your Dog
As in, "Audit this, IRS!"
The IRS had basically decided to only bring dog pix in the way they were picking and choosing emails of Lois Lerner to show Congress. The WSJ has an editorial about this, rightly calling it the "IRS Contempt of Congress":
The IRS is now telling Congress that it has lost the emails of no fewer than seven IRS employees central to the targeting of conservative nonprofits, though that's only half the outrage. There's also the IRS's quiet admission that it has spent most of the past year willfully defying Congress.After informing Congress on Friday that it can't find two years of email from former Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner, House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp revealed Tuesday that the IRS can't produce records for six more employees whose hard drives also supposedly failed. These six happen to have been central to the IRS crackdown on conservative groups, and the lost emails were sent when the targeting took place, including in 2010 and 2011. The six include Nicole Flax, former chief of staff to former IRS Commissioner Steven Miller.
There's an equally disturbing IRS confession contained in its Friday letter to Congress. Some history: House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa as early as June 4, 2013 asked the IRS to provide "all documents and communications sent by, received by, or copied to Lois Lerner" between Jan. 1, 2009 and the present." Note the "all."
...The IRS has from the start been picking and choosing which of Ms. Lerner's emails it deigned to show Congress. And it did so despite knowing that Congress wanted everything.
This IRS filter has delayed the investigation and denied Congress access to important information. Congressional investigators learned only last week that Ms. Lerner corresponded with the Justice Department about potentially prosecuting conservative nonprofits. Congress had to subpoena Justice to obtain that Lerner correspondence. Only after Congress demanded the IRS explain why it hadn't provided this Lerner-Justice correspondence did the IRS suddenly confess in its Friday letter that it had been picking and choosing emails.
And now we get the disappearance of seven hard drives. Ms. Lerner's hard drive, by the way, appears to have "crashed" in June 2011, not long after Mr. Camp first asked the IRS if there was any political targeting going on. She denied it. Mr. Koskinen is due to testify before Congress on Friday, and he's got a lot to answer for.
The arrogance and contempt for Congress and the public in this -- blogged by The Blaze's Jason Howerton -- is stunning:
The emails sent by ex-IRS official Lois Lerner that may have provided crucial details about the tax agency's targeting of conservative groups could be lost forever after her "crashed" hard drive was "recycled," several sources told Politico on Wednesday.Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) told the publication that lawmakers were "informed that the hard drive has been thrown away." Other anonymous sources also reportedly confirmed the development.
You're forced to keep your receipts for how long, in case some IRS snoop wants to go through them and fine you or maybe even send you to jail?
Remember, this is the agency tasked with ensuring that you have health insurance.
On the bright side, the VA hasn't been given control over the country's medical facilities.
Yet.
I R A Darth Aggie at June 19, 2014 6:11 AM
For what it's worth - and the other techies on this forum will surely confirm: the excuse that a crashed PC or hard-drive would cause the IRS to lose emails is simply not credible.
In any organization above a certain size, all important files (including your emails) are stored centrally and backed up regularly. A computer crash would - at it's absolute and unbelievable worst - destroy a few hours worth of data.
a_random_guy at June 19, 2014 6:15 AM
Given the NSA copies everything why not ask them?
lujlp at June 19, 2014 6:30 AM
Random, Megan McArdle had an interesting article on Bloomberg yesterday, which I'll try to dig up. (She was an IT person before she went into journalism.) She speculates that the IRS was not, in fact archiving emails; that they were relying on individual employees to use the Outlook auto-archiving mechanism to archive their own emails on their individual drives. If that were the case, then the loss of one person's emails due to a drive failure would be a credible explanation, barring other evidence. However, if that is the case, then it is noted that the government has very stringent standards regarding communications archiving for the private sector. My own employer spends untold amounts of money every year archiving records, keeping records of records, and paying for secure offsite storage for stuff going back to the 1970s. By appearances, the government does not hold itself to anywhere near as strict a standard.
Further: under McArdle's explanation, the failure of a drive explains one person's lost emails. It does not explain seven, all of which conincidentlaly happen to be under subpoena. The only plausiable explanation at this point is conspiracy.
Cousin Dave at June 19, 2014 6:38 AM
They should have been backing up the Exchange (or other e-mail) server, and keeping it forever.
That would have also caught most of the e-mails as well. Either way the IRS loosing those particular e-mail accounts says to me they are in contempt of Congress.
Jim P. at June 19, 2014 7:26 AM
Well that might account for the IRS servers. But what about all the emails that went back and forth between Lerner, et. al and the servers outside the IRS? The recipient of those emails will have them saved on a server somewhere - i.e., I HIGHLY doubt the White House is banking on Outlook to save their emails. Any back and forth between outside sources would be saved on their servers, right? It just all sounds so incredulous that IRS email would possibly be lost, that if there were a Republican in office right now there would seriously already be picketing going on at the White House gates and the IRS headquarters.
gooseegg at June 19, 2014 8:37 AM
One set of rules for me, and another set for thee.
Pirate Jo at June 19, 2014 9:28 AM
@Cousin Dave: I suppose nothing should surprise me about the government, but allowing individual email retention - setting things up like a mom'n'pop shop - would be just absolutely incompetent on the part of the IT department.
If that is the case (incompetence), heads should role, from the CIO-equivalent on down.
Unless it is deliberate, precisely so that they can "lose" email files when necessary. Seven of them in this case...
a_random_guy at June 19, 2014 10:56 AM
"Unless it is deliberate, precisely so that they can "lose" email files when necessary. "
That's what I suspect, actually. In my years of contracting, I've observed that maintaining plausible deniability is a big deal in civil service.
Cousin Dave at June 19, 2014 12:38 PM
It is pretty easy to "crash" a hard drive if you drop it in an incinerator. This is blatant destruction of evidence and should be treated as such.
Matt at June 19, 2014 12:52 PM
Data recovery services can usually get most all if not all but a tiny bit of data of a hard drive after a simply crash. Now a crash into an incinerator is a different story. If they didn't care and just repurposed the drive or through it out well then it can't be recovered now.
At my previous employer email was a big deal. It was deleted after 90 days unless it met specific criteria which meant it had to be saved. Saving emails to a local pst file and having it longer than those 90 days was a fire able offense (I don't know of anyone who actually was) unless they could show it met the criteria or at least they in good faith thought it did.
The Former Banker at June 19, 2014 7:22 PM
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