IRS unable to produce emails to Congress

mittman said:

another common practice of purging instead of archiving old emails to free up space and you have a recipe for this.

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I only took a portion of your post, but the IRS paid $70 million in bonuses and operates with a $12.8 billion budget. To surmise that anyone is watching the expenditures and actually trying to save taxpayers money through frugal practices like freeing up space is ludicrous.

ValuJet said:

I only took a portion of your post, but the IRS paid $70 million in bonuses and operates with a $12.8 billion budget. To surmise that anyone is watching the expenditures and actually trying to save taxpayers money through frugal practices like freeing up space is ludicrous.

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Agreed.

I have seen plenty of configurations that made me scratch my head. That is especially true of government contractors and GS's. I just put my Mythbuster cap on and found it barely plausible. Not likely, very convenient, but it still got to plausible.

Example: A client of mine had a mail server crash repeatedly because someone added a pretty background image to all of her emails. Apparently several thousand emails that barely fit under their maximum size policy along with multiple cases of reply to all (this seemed to be the norm there) that included the image filled up the available storage pretty quickly. Their 'IT guy' couldn't figure out why the disk space was getting used up so instead of doing a simple check of the mailbox sizes they adjusted their retention policy and limited the quotas to a point where the users had to keep things deleted. Sure enough a few years later they had a lawsuit requiring emails that were less than a year old. They had us come in to try to do some recovery and luckily we found an old tape backup that had dropped out of the rotation. It didn't take long to see who's mailbox was huge and then figure out why. The guy just didn't want to deal with it.

mittman said:

To be somewhat fair rotating backups of mail servers that overwrite the media without taking archives is very common practice. Couple that with another common practice of purging instead of archiving old emails to free up space and you have a recipe for this. I have seen enough examples to actually believe this may have happened. Coupling that with a hard drive issue on the local machine is way too convenient, but it can and does happen.

This is most likely not the case, but a lot of entities do not leave the data on their mail server. As soon as it is downloaded to the client some delete them. They can be set up either way.

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OK, fair enough. But this is the US Government we're talking about, not some private corporation. As we all know, the US Government doesn't lose anything - ever. They keep everything - especially the IRS.
Heck, they even have copies of every piece of paper I submitted during my last income tax audit way back in 1978.
Knowing that, what do you think are the chances that 43.000 very selected emails are deleted from a particular computer or server without them having been backed up?

Bama Reb said:

OK, fair enough. But this is the US Government we're talking about, not some private corporation. As we all know, the US Government doesn't lose anything - ever. They keep everything - especially the IRS.
Heck, they even have copies of every piece of paper I submitted during my last income tax audit way back in 1978.
Knowing that, what do you think are the chances that 43.000 very selected emails are deleted from a particular computer or server without them having been backed up?

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If it is in the political interest of members of the Administration or the bureaucracy that it uses? Pretty much 100%

ValuJet said:

I only took a portion of your post, but the IRS paid $70 million in bonuses and operates with a $12.8 billion budget. To surmise that anyone is watching the expenditures and actually trying to save taxpayers money through frugal practices like freeing up space is ludicrous.

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Has an employee of the IRS ever been audited?

Tidewater said:

If it is in the political interest of members of the Administration or the bureaucracy that it uses? Pretty much 100%

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I am NOT a Democrat or Republican!

However, the Democrats apologies on that committee almost made me throw up!

This should NOT be about politics, but about what's RIGHT and what's WRONG! The American people are being screwed by the IRS!

I just hope that all WRONGS will be RIGHTED in the future!

Al A Bama said:

I am NOT a Democrat or Republican!

However, the Democrats apologies on that committee almost made me throw up!

This should NOT be about politics, but about what's RIGHT and what's WRONG! The American people are being screwed by the IRS!

I just hope that all WRONGS will be RIGHTED in the future!

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I did not mean to say or imply that Republican administration would be any better.
Once the IRS has become weaponized in a political sense, it's going to be awfully difficult to get that toothpaste back in the tube.

Almost all of the government has become weaponized against anyone who opposes those in charge. The government is now little more than a criminal regime that launders money to its supporters and rewards sloth and theft. Yes, Democrats are in charge now but Republicans in Congress have the power to stop what is happening, they choose not to. Whether it is personal greed and lust for power or fear of exposure of some kind, I do not know. I do know those running the country into the ground are evil, not inept.

BamainBoston said:

I don't know how anyone can believe there's not a coverup at this point.

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BarackOgate

The IRS needs to be abolished on day one of the next administration. People have long wanted fundamental change to the tax system...well here is their chance. Look for it to be a rather prominent topic in 2016. Abolish 16

bamacon said:

The IRS needs to be abolished on day one of the next administration. People have long wanted fundamental change to the tax system...well here is their chance. Look for it to be a rather prominent topic in 2016. Abolish 16

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Agree. As an aside, remember that it is the IRS that is supposed to enforce participation in Obamacare. Abolish the IRS, eliminate enforcement of Obamacare. No enforcement, no participation. No participation, no more Obamacare. Sounds like a plan to me.

bamacon said:

The IRS needs to be abolished on day one of the next administration. People have long wanted fundamental change to the tax system...well here is their chance. Look for it to be a rather prominent topic in 2016. Abolish 16

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I think the ruling "elites" like the IRS because it has become a medium of control.
"If you income is X, then this is your tax payment.
Wave a banana over your head, and you get to keep $1,000 of your money.
Jump up and down and bark like a poodle and you get to keep another $1,000 of your money," etc.

Disband the IRS and they won't have that control. (Or they will have to rebuild it in whatever agency they come up with next.).

formersoldier71 said:

http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/22/i...rage-firm-weeks-after-lerners-computer-crash/

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"Most transparent administration in history."

Let's see.......multiple computer crashes and a failed computer launch on Obamacare.......good thing these folks won't be managing something important like, say, our health care.

selmaborntidefan said:

Let's see.......multiple computer crashes and a failed computer launch on Obamacare.......good thing these folks won't be managing something important like, say, our health care.

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The computer crashes are pretty common in a corp environment. Especially with laptops. Those things take some abuse.

I still don't know why they don't have tape backups. People can keep everything they want in a local pst, but they should still have tape backups of the server. I'm still saying it looks like a case of lazy or incompetent government IT workers.

2003TIDE said:

The computer crashes are pretty common in a corp environment. Especially with laptops. Those things take some abuse.

I still don't know why they don't have tape backups. People can keep everything they want in a local pst, but they should still have tape backups of the server. I'm still saying it looks like a case of lazy or incompetent government IT workers.

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Tape schmape. They should have a server (or server farm) with disaster recovery software replicating to a geographically separated site with archives taken automatically. This can be afforded by the smallest of companies and has been available for years.

crimsonaudio said:

It's odd, I've literally not had a hard drive physically die in years. I wonder why they have so many crashes?

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Yup, I agree. Way too convenient that all of this happened. Not impossible, but way too convenient. It may not have been a hard drive crash per se, but an equipment failure where they have a policy ensuring that the drive was completely destroyed so no later recover is possible. That is the more likely scenario and is not all bad. There would be just as big an issue with someone getting a former IRS agent's machine and recovering sensitive information about an investigation.

I am not trying to make excuses here. Just saying I have seen enough of this happen.