Posted on 06/16/2014 8:29:36 PM PDT by smoothsailing
June 16, 2014
The Internal Revenue Service claims, as of last Friday, that two years’ worth of Lois Lerner’s external emails are gone forever. You can read the letter in which the IRS told Senators Hatch and Wyden that Lerner’s external emails from 2009 to 2011, the critical time period for the IRS’s effort to suppress conservative nonprofits, have been lost, here. The letter is signed by Leonard Oursler, National Director for Legislative Affairs. If you keep reading, you eventually will get to the part about Lerner’s emails.
The IRS describes its system for storing emails. As I noted here, emails reside in user accounts on email servers:
The IRS email system runs on Microsoft Outlook. Each of the Outlook email servers are [sic] located at one of three IRS data centers. … For disaster recovery purposes, the IRS does a daily back-up of its email servers. … Prior to May 2013, these backups were retained on tape for six months, and then for cost efficiency, the back-up tapes were released for re-use. In May of last year, the IRS changed its policy and began storing rather than recycling its backup tapes.
Yes, I’ll bet they did! This is almost incredible. But wait, it gets worse. It turns out that each IRS employee, even senior managers like Lois Lerner, have ridiculously little space allotted to them on the un-backed up email servers:
Due to financial and practical considerations, the IRS has limited the total volume of email stored on its server by restricting the amount of email most individual users can keep in an inbox at any given time. …
Currently, the average individual employee’s email box limit is 500 megabytes, which translates to approximately 6,000 emails. … Prior to July 2011, the limit was lower, 150 megabytes or roughly 1,800 emails.
These are absurdly low limits. By way of comparison, the Power Line Gmail account currently contains 12,437 megabytes of material–83 times as much storage as was permitted to an IRS employee before July 2011. A senior employee like Lois Lerner would probably send or receive 1,800 emails in a few weeks at most, thereby exhausting (if the IRS’s account is believed) his or her allotted server capacity. At that point, the IRS reverted to manual document management. Seriously:
If an email user’s box gets close to capacity, the system sends a message to the user noting that soon the mailbox will become unable to send additional messages.
Given the tiny mailbox capacity, this must happen every few days.
When a user needs to create space in his or her email box, the user has the option of either deleting emails (that do not qualify as official records) or moving them out of the active email box (inbox, sent items, deleted items) to an archive. … Archived email is moved off the IRS email server and onto the employee’s hard drive on the employee’s individual computer. As a result, these IRS employees’ emails no longer exist in the active email box of the employee and are not backed-up as part of the daily backup of the email servers. Email moved to a personal archive of an employee exists only on the individual employee’s hard drive.
If this is true, it means that the IRS’s record-keeping is utterly inadequate. It has no systematic record of the decisions made and actions taken by IRS employees. Within six months, all centrally located and accessible email records–which, in today’s world, means more than 90% of the relevant documents–are gone. Records of the agency’s actions exist, after that time–if they exist at all–only on individual desktop or laptop computers, from which they cannot be accessed or reviewed in any efficient way. And forget about hard drive crashes, what happens when an employee gets a new computer, or is replaced by a new employee with his or her own computer? Are emails systematically copied from one computer to another so that the IRS will have a record of what the employee has done, assuming that the employee took the trouble to archive them in the first place? I doubt it.
My opinion of the federal government’s efficiency is not high, but I find it hard to believe that this is really how the IRS manages its records. I am not a tax lawyer, but I assume that any corporation subjected to an IRS audit, or any other kind of government investigation, that had this lousy a system of preserving records would be crucified.
That is all very interesting, but the question remains: did Lois Lerner really lose the only copies of her 2009-2011 emails in a hard drive crash? In its correspondence, the IRS tried to prove the point by attaching an email thread in which the agency’s IT professionals sadly advised Ms. Lerner that they had been unable to recover her missing files. But if you read to the end of the thread (i.e., the beginning) you see Lerner’s email of July 19, 2011, in which she laments the loss of “personal files” due to her computer’s crash, but never mentions any lost emails. Click to enlarge:
It is remarkable that Lerner does not say: “Oh no! My hard drive crashed, and the IRS’s only copy of two years’ worth of my highly important work has been lost!” No: she is concerned about “my lost personal files,” because “there were some documents in the files that are irreplaceable.” That is a clearly stated and entirely reasonable concern, but it has nothing to do with losing the agency’s only record of two years of work.
If this is the best the IRS can come up with, it has much more explaining to do.
The precision of the “lost” emails is the give away.
And OTOH I’m sure the NSA has her crap on some black server somewhere.
You’re totally correct. But they don’t care whether anyone believes them or not. They will just say “We told you, the emails are gone, now shut up about it”.
In other words, “Move on!”
Rules are different for “us” than for “them”. Try using “My records were lost when my hard disk crashed” excuse to the IRS and they will say “F### you, you must pay the penalty PLUS interest anyway”.
Issa needs to hit them hard and stop belly aching.
You’re not wrong at all. They’re just lying their butts off.
NSA anyone?
The claim is that (1) tape backups of mail stores are only stored for six months, (2) that when a user's mailbox reaches a critical size, the excess is downloaded to the local workstation and stored (likely in OST files), and (3) that when that happens it is no longer present on the servers and hence vulnerable to loss if the workstation experiences a hard drive crash.
For a small to medium size operation this is actually quite believable, assuming that it is unlikely that the email will ever need to be retrieved for purposes of, say, intellectual property rights or legal discovery. For an operation the size of the IRS, given its job and the sensitivity of data that are likely to be present in those emails, it is absolutely unprofessional, derelict in duty, and quite possibly actionable.
Understand that the system as described is deliberately designed to discard evidence. This is not some small company that can't afford tape storage. These are not people dealing with electric bills or Ebay sales. These are people who can put citizens in prison for lengthy terms based on the evidence they have before them.
This opens up a rather interesting can of worms for anyone convicted recently of tax evasion, among other violations. They subpoena the records including the email transactions. If those are unavailable, the case is seriously compromised.
Which is why I don't believe a word of this. If the IRS really were this incredibly careless or cavalier about the data they exchange then the firings should begin with the IT director and continue down to the most junior operator. But it's a pretty solid story if you're willing to throw your entire IT staff under the bus. And they're more than willing.
The email may, in fact, be recovered from the recipients if it is possible to determine who they are and subpoena their records individually. That is a daunting but not impossible task. But in all this one thing is very clear: this is a criminal operation run by criminal conspirators. The corruption is that deep. And it is nearly untouchable.
The citizen must not be held to a higher standard of compliance with the law than the regulating agency is willing to observe itself. A government that will give itself a pass without informing anyone else is a government that has an insufficient fear of the seriousness of the power we have delegated to it.
Well, in my book, what can be delegated can be undelegated. And that is exactly what I hope an Article V Convention of the States to amend the Constitution does.
The practice of archiving presumably is the result of an Act of Congress, since the whole apparatus would require funding.
And, presumably, this Act of Congress sets some standards for maintenance of records and their recovery.
Is the IRS in violation of this Act? If so, shouldn't Congress immediately prepare for discovery leading to prosecutions?
I have to keep records of real estate transactions. I have emails back to 2007. How can the IRS not keep these vital email trails current?
All businesses are required by the IRS to keep six years worth of records.
Bookmark
and then states here assistant get to her email also?
I say we should go back to using carbon paper. The only way something could be “lost” would be with a shredder.
.”They really think we’re stupid.”
No.
They really think we are cowards.
That’s what they must be doing again. (A fishing expedition in Alaska, outside of cell phone and internet coverage, etc.)
So when we e-file unless they print it out the IRS does not have a copy of our tax return after a year? If all their files are backed up like email...........
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