“In my organization, we are not to use our C: drives. I would not lose a single business-related computer file of any kind”
Not only best practice but pretty well standard practice, probably followed by the vast majority of networks having any more than a few dozen workstations.
Also, the specific reference to the hard drive failure is very, very unusual. I’m sure if you took a poll of I.T. Administrators virtually none ever get into specifics like that when sending out a notification of any kind of outage or failure.
In addition, I find it odd that only 14 people were notified and not a mass emailing to all her contacts.
If it’s a problem that the I.T techs can fix quickly, then no notification at all is required. Incoming emails would queue up and be delivered as soon as it was fixed. If not, then surely she would have had many dozens of contacts that should have been notified.
I’d say that gives us a pretty good idea of at least 14 more IRS employees in on the criminality.