
IRS claims to have lost 2 years of Director's emails - MrZongle2
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=384506
======
meepmorp
I've seen a fair number of comments assuming malfeasance here, so I'm just
gonna note an actual news article about this. From
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3217839...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=321783982)

> The IRS said technicians went to great lengths trying to recover data from
> Lerner's computer in 2011. In emails provided by the IRS, technicians said
> they sent the computer to a forensic lab run by the agency's criminal
> investigations unit. But to no avail.

> The IRS was able to generate 24,000 Lerner emails from the 2009 to 2011
> because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. The agency said it pieced
> together the emails from the computers of 82 other IRS employees.

So, reading between the lines here, it looks like the IRS doesn't archive
email at the server level, and any copies of mail were retrieved from
individual workstations.

I don't see conspiracy here. I see incompetent IT processes and a lack of
mandated data retention policies. Maybe I'm predisposed to employ Hanlon's
razor, but that's only because I've found it to be the best explanation for
most situations like this. If it was a coverup, it's a terrible one.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
>I see incompetent IT processes and a lack of mandated data retention
policies.

Having worked in government for well over a decade now, I can tell you that
this is undoubtedly the case. That is not to say all departments have poor
practices, but on the whole there is no standardization and each organization
does things differently.

I have worked in offices that have NO server archive and everyone relies on
PST's, and others where there are server archives but they are limited to
500MB or something small and they just start deleting items by date.

~~~
rpgmaker
No, it is not "undoubtedly" the case. There would be a lot of incentives in
"losing" those years of emails.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I really do think Hanlon's razor applies here. I don't disagree that the
incentive is there, but I think the total failure of the USG to do technology
correctly is the more likely culprit. I can tell you from first hand
experience that I know of very senior people who have lost months of data from
what would be a simple migration or corrupted virtual instance. Boggles the
mind really.

~~~
graylights
Agreed. A lot of it has to do how government contracts for IT support.
Contracts quickly get out of date. The contractors are also all trying to lock
themselves in.

It's common for the contractor to own all the IT equipment and just lease it
to the government. What happens when it's time to change contracts and every
single computer, phone, printer has to be replaced. There is no possibility
for competitive bidding in the wake of that.

~~~
niels_olson
Yep. This is the biggest unspoken scandal in government. It has probably taken
years off of my life. The whole system is in shambles.

------
TallGuyShort
And yet if I "lost" 2 years of financial records...

~~~
throwaway5752
Then you would probably try to piece together your tax liability through
indirect methods, completely analogous to what they did here to recover the
emails. What did you expect they'd do?

Say, if you claimed $1000 in charitable donations but lost the receipts and
got audited, you'd probably be able to go to the organization you donated to
get their records. If they couldn't produce them, you'd probably have the
deduction disallowed and have to pay back taxes + interest.

If you're going to try to glibly score points, chose a better example.

------
brentjanderson
Wonder if the NSA can provide copies... ;)

~~~
newman8r
I came here to post this joke. damn, damn, damn!

------
noonespecial
If one does one's job so poorly that no one can tell if one engaged in
criminal activity while doing it or not, shouldn't that be grounds for
permanent removal from government service?

It would only take a handful of examples and this stuff would go away.

------
eplanit
I can't decide if this smacks more of Iran-Contra or of Nixon. C'mon, the
excuse of 'irretrievable' emails has been nonsense for some decades:

[http://articles.latimes.com/1987-08-10/business/fi-58_1_comp...](http://articles.latimes.com/1987-08-10/business/fi-58_1_computer-
files)

------
geetee
Rather convenient? I would love to see how they manage their IT resources.

~~~
reitzensteinm
To see whether something is amiss statistically, we'd have to also check
whether data of no consequence goes missing at the same frequency.

If organizations are really bad at storing data, but it only gets tested with
important queries, incompetence is going to look a lot like malice (I make no
case for which this particular incident is).

Of course, I've painted somewhat of a false dichotomy. If you are required by
policy to retain email, doing so is unlikely to give you any benefit and may
well cause severe political problems.

The most logical thing to do is severely understaff and underbudget the
sysadmins responsible. Then, when the backups are needed, there's a
significant chance they'll be nowhere to be found, and you've saved money in
the process too.

That would be malicious incompetence, so to speak.

~~~
rickhanlonii
Seems like an application of Hanlon's Razor[1], with an important extension:

> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,
> _unless that stupidity is adequately explained by malice._

I'd like to coin this extension Hanlon's Exception.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor)

~~~
Crito
I'm a fan of Gray's Law: _" Sufficiently advanced stupidity is
indistinguishable from malice"_

That is to say, if you "fuck up" bad enough, why should society give a shit
that you did not have malicious intent? Much like drunk driving, I think that
this is a fine case for strict liability.

~~~
chc
What is the good you hope to accomplish by this? The reason we have the idea
of intent encoded in the law is not because intentional acts are more harmful,
but because inflicting severe penalties on people for things they can't even
have known they were doing wrong or didn't mean to do is both contrary to the
idea of justice and ineffective as a deterrent. The idea of throwing out the
principle of mens rea just because the results of something were bad is both
anti-utilitarian and contrary to the idea of justice. (Especially since the
bar for "bad enough" is apparently low enough to include "not fastidiously
keeping manually generated email archives". Jaywalkers beware!)

------
lsh123
And in the same time, IRS managed to give taxpayer data to FBI. Of course some
very specific taxpayers have been included in the data dump:

[http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/irs-gave-
fbi-1...](http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/irs-gave-
fbi-1-1-million-pages-of-taxpayer-data-to-encourage-prosecution-of-
conservatives.php)

~~~
jd75
They targeted progressive groups to a greater extent, based on the information
we have. [http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/04/23/3429722/irs-
rec...](http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/04/23/3429722/irs-records-tea-
party/)

------
protomyth
And here are the IRS's own standards for e-mail:
[http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html](http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html)

of note: section 1.10.3.2.3 (07-08-2011) Emails as Possible Federal Records

5\. Please note that maintaining a copy of an email or its attachments within
the IRS email MS Outlook application does not meet the requirements of
maintaining an official record. Therefore, print and file email and its
attachments if they are either permanent records or if they relate to a
specific case.

[edit] a video of a committee meeting
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax6QGmKhRwo&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax6QGmKhRwo&feature=youtu.be)

------
tvanantwerp
At least people might honestly believe Lerner and the IRS lost 2 years of
email. That level of incompetence is expected of bureaucrats, and it's harder
to prove misconduct than if you hid communications through an alias like Lisa
Jackson at the EPA did.

------
smoorman1024
Does anyone have expertise on whether there are any regulations on proper
storage of government data? Does anyone know how an agency like the IRS would
store their company email and if their claim is a feasible possibility?

~~~
mkempe
Simple test: Has any other IRS employee lost all their email messages covering
the exact same period?

------
itbeho
Rather than take a political side in this, I'd rather look at it
pragmatically. If the IRS expects us to keep proper records, then they should
set the example for us to follow.

------
exabrial
You know, as a matter of fact... I don't recall working the last two years. I
also lost all of my tax records. That's not a problem right?

------
BrandonMarc
How many businesses are _required_ to store, archive, and always have ready
access to email for "compliance" reasons (i.e. by law they have to, laws which
are enforced by guns)? If the IRS doesn't have to follow the same rules, well
that's very interesting.

What I wonder is, how do such people (Lerner, Holder, Obama) still have _any_
credibility in the minds of those who vote for them?

(well, those who vote for them receive their information through filters, just
like you and me, and so they'll probably never know that these hard drives,
laptops, data, "disappeared")

Which leads to the follow-up question: how can we get this news to reach those
who vote for these people, given they (or their filters) would avoid such a
story in the first place?

------
imjustsaying
There's at least two clear incentives here.

Losing the evidence means the hole in Smaug's armor is temporarily patched for
when it flies in to Laketown.

Secondly, losing the evidence means they get an innocuous selling point when
they request a bigger budget to implement that arcane task of backing up
files.

------
MaggieL
The most interesting claim is that only email from outside the agency has been
"lost".

~~~
cleverjake
well, considering they are claiming its only emails from the director, any
email sent to her from inside would be available as a sent email from that
person.

~~~
BrandonMarc
True ... if you know who was sending her email. And then we found out the
White House had created hundreds of "fake" email accounts with names belonging
to no actual human working in the White House ...

------
fleitz
Should be easy to fix, criminally charge those involved with obstruction of
justice, declare it an issue of national security and request that the NSA
provide these emails.

Where are the drives, where are the backups? Why haven't the drives been sent
to 3rd parties for extraction including reading platters directly.

~~~
meepmorp
This appears to have been an individual workstation (see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891622](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891622)),
and the problem seems to have occurred in 2011, before this became a political
issue. It's possible that nobody thought that it was an important enough
problem to warrant sending the disks out for 3rd party forensics.

~~~
fleitz
I find it difficult to believe that an organization that advocates keeping
coffee receipts for 7 years wouldn't have an email archiving solution in
place.

------
xirdstl
It is interesting to see the responses both ways here: those who think there
is malfeasance and those who don't, both with various reasonings. It would be
more interesting to see the same posts next to the author's political leaning.
i.e. how many people have an opinion that reflects something outside their own
inherit political bias.

------
dueprocess
The NSA will have a copy. Ask them.

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tendom
Bullshit.

------
monochr
Republican logic: Demand the strictest most penny pinching policies from the
IRS while you are defunding them[1]. Complain when said defunding affects one
of your pet issues because they can't afford a central server and store every
email on local machines [2].

This is the same sort of stupidity that we see on parade every time they fight
tooth and nail to get some borderline unconstitutional religious law passed
only to the the fastest about face imaginable when they find out that
"religion" doesn't main "only my religion" in law.

[1] [http://www.taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/2012-Annual-
Report/irs-f...](http://www.taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/2012-Annual-Report/irs-
funding/)

[2]
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3217839...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=321783982)

~~~
johngalt
Is the 'us vs them' attitude really so strong in your mind? Do you think it's
perfectly reasonable for an organization that spends $1.5billion on IT to be
unable to retain their _directors_ email? I can't help but think that your
opinion would be different if this was email between oil executives.

~~~
monochr
"Do you think it's perfectly reasonable for an organization that spends
$1.5billion on IT to be unable to retain their directors email?"

You do realize that the IRS it budget is spent on trying to keep a database of
every American running for ever on $5 a years per person? Email servers don't
have anything to do with that. And having seem "cost cutting" measures in both
government and industry the "non-essential" services like a centralized email
server would be the first to go.

So yes, it is, you get the government you pay for.

~~~
johngalt
Surely organizations will always point to a lack of funding in response to a
lack of performance. But I find it odd that they were certainly able to spare
the time and budget to target opposition groups. Yet nothing was in the budget
to keep any record of their actions.

~~~
monochr
"johngalt"

Oh I thought for a second I was talking to a non-troll. My bad.

~~~
Crito
Way to not address his point. Who is the _real_ troll?

------
interstitial
HN is going to have trouble with this one: The techno-utopianism clashes with
messianic politics of the chosen one.

------
javert
The IRS is a violation of individual rights and should be dismantled. It is
not in anyone's true self-interest. People who are actually pursuing their own
self-interest are hurt by it, only those that are not receive the "benefits"
of it.

~~~
lotsofmangos
How you plan on funding the army? Pillage?

~~~
dnautics
could use corporate taxes. Note the top poster said "individual rights".

~~~
lotsofmangos
Hey, companies are people too.

~~~
dnautics
companies are most certainly people; corporations are not. Don't like
corporate taxes? Do business as a partnership.

Of course corporations should enjoy freedom of speech, etc (because to curtail
those necessarily curtails some individual's freedom), but do they get to
vote? No.

