IRS unable to produce emails to Congress

formersoldier71 said:

http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/26/meet-the-seven-irs-employees-whose-computers-crashed/

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Again, there's no way that they do not have an archival plan, and either a disaster recovery or business continuity plan. Or at the very least, a half-decent backup strategy. No way. And I should know.

If nothing else, this whole escapade should at least initiate a new era in IRS policing. They never ever have the right to penalize someone for losing their records. And that is assuming the absolute very best in this whole scenario.

It still feels like the IRS is saying, "Yeah we covered stuff up. Yeah we deleted electronic records. Yeah we're lying about it. But, really, what are you going to do about it? I mean, we're the freakin' IRS."

bamahippie said:

Again, there's no way that they do not have an archival plan, and either a disaster recovery or business continuity plan. Or at the very least, a half-decent backup strategy. No way. And I should know.

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I think they're using their back-up strategy, and it's going to work - scream if you want, but at the end of the day no one will be held accountable and we all know it. I'm afraid that we are seeing the results of unchecked Federalism. The last few administrations have shown that although we could them squirm, we couldn't make them stop. Now it's to the point that they don't even squirm. They swagger.

crimsonaudio said:

That's an amazing coincidence!

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bamahippie said:

Again, there's no way that they do not have an archival plan, and either a disaster recovery or business continuity plan. Or at the very least, a half-decent backup strategy. No way. And I should know.

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I agree with both of these statements.

However, again just to be completely fair. I have had a few issues with Sonasoft (the archiving company they said they used) before. Their stubbing software actually modifies the email store on the server instead of just creating an archive. The software actually goes into the Exchange server store and removes attachments from emails and replaces them with a link to their own store to reduce load and storage on the actual Exchange server. If you were not careful when doing away with them you could lose emails and especially their attachments. I can see a case where getting rid of an archiving company (especially that one) without doing it right could have caused data loss.

Multiple client drives crashing nearly simultaneously reeks of a cover up. Couple that with a premature storage retirement. One would think heads would have rolled. Sooner or later they are going to have to blame someone specific for losing the data. That will be interesting.

mittman said:

However, again just to be completely fair. I have had a few issues with Sonasoft (the archiving company they said they used) before. Their stubbing software actually modifies the email store on the server instead of just creating an archive. The software actually goes into the Exchange server store and removes attachments from emails and replaces them with a link to their own store to reduce load and storage on the actual Exchange server. If you were not careful when doing away with them you could lose emails and especially their attachments. I can see a case where getting rid of an archiving company (especially that one) without doing it right could have caused data loss.

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I agree with you mostly. My concern is, that as a government entity, that they only had one way to recover something that was missing? Or that their retention policy was that short-term? And Exchange 2010 and 2013 are quite flexible already, with the use of clustering, DAGs, etc. My point is that they have little to no excuse. I mean, if the IRS needed me to produce documents, wouldn't I be accountable to produce? Would saying "Um, I lost that" cut it? Methinks not.

bamahippie said:

I agree with you mostly. My concern is, that as a government entity, that they only had one way to recover something that was missing? Or that their retention policy was that short-term? And Exchange 2010 and 2013 are quite flexible already, with the use of clustering, DAGs, etc. My point is that they have little to no excuse. I mean, if the IRS needed me to produce documents, wouldn't I be accountable to produce? Would saying "Um, I lost that" cut it? Methinks not.

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I agree, there should have been a few heads rolling round back then. One would think they would immediately point to the 'skulls'.

Koskinen testified on June 23 that “The responsibility is, if you have an email that’s a record, you print it out in hard copy . . . My understanding is every employee is supposed to print records . . . that are official records on hard copy and keep them. She had hard copy records.”

But a week later Lerner’s attorney Bill Taylor essentially threw the IRS under the bus to defend his client. Taylor released a series of statements to a Virginia-based publication stating that Lerner did not know she was supposed to comply with federal law.

“Lerner did not print out official records she may have sent over email because she didn’t know she had to,” Taylor said. “If somebody is supposed to keep archived copies, that’s the IT department’s or her staff’s responsibility.”

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Only the government, in 2014, would require paper backup of electronic documents.:rolleye2:

Bamaro said:

Only the government, in 2014, would require paper backup of electronic documents.:rolleye2:

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Here, inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government’s own workers.


But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.




The employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time. They work underground not for secrecy but for space. The old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhole-of-bureaucracy/

formersoldier71 said:

http://news.yahoo.com/lois-lerner-warned-colleagues-2013-emails-being-stored-211804914.html

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Whoopsie.

I wonder when people are going to get tired of calling for prison sentences and instead just start heating up the tar and gathering feathers.

Trey Gowdy approves of these last few posts.

crimsonaudio said:

SIAP and I haven't checked the math on this, but...

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In other words, the odds are greater that you will win the Florida Lottery 342 times than having those seven IRS hard drives crashing in the same month.

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This statement seems to confuse multiplication with using an exponent. Winning the Florida lottery just twice is much more unlikely than even nine such hard drive failures.

7 drive failures: (1/36)^7 = 1 in 78,364,164,096
9 drive failures: (1/36)^9 = 1 in 101,559,956,668,416

Florida lottery: (1/22,957,480) = 1 in 22,957,480
Florida lottery twice: (1/22,957,480)^2 = 1 in 527,045,887,950,400
Florida lottery 342 times: (1/22,957,480)^342 = 1 in some number with 2518 digits.

To reach this level of improbability would take 1618 such hard drive failures
1618 hard drive failures: (1/36)^1618 = 1 in some number with 2519 digits