[EVO X]

Seems the IT folks didn’t want to go the extra mile at any point, so my guess is some low to mid level Nuts and Bolts IT guy(s) were given the directive.

An IT person responsible for data recovery recommended the drive be sent off to data recovery experts, but it wasn't. If the computer user tells IT they didn't lose anything important, they aren't going to send the drive off.

The hard drive crash should have been reported to the National Archives. It is not clear who is suppose to make the report. The IT people could make a report that it crashed, but wouldn't be able to say what important documents were lost. So I am guessing it was up to the computer user or their department to make the report.

[tacticalogic]

Hard drives have a label glued on over at least a couple of the screws you have to remove to get the cover off. It would be nearly impossible to get into it to scratch the platters without it being obvious it was tampered with.

I think they replaced her hard drive with one from another computer that was crashed before they handed it over to the techs.

The techs could then testify that they found the drive was damaged, but recovering the data would have revealed that it wasn't her hard drive.