Posted on 06/16/2014 8:29:36 PM PDT by smoothsailing
June 16, 2014
The Internal Revenue Service claims, as of last Friday, that two years’ worth of Lois Lerner’s external emails are gone forever. You can read the letter in which the IRS told Senators Hatch and Wyden that Lerner’s external emails from 2009 to 2011, the critical time period for the IRS’s effort to suppress conservative nonprofits, have been lost, here. The letter is signed by Leonard Oursler, National Director for Legislative Affairs. If you keep reading, you eventually will get to the part about Lerner’s emails.
The IRS describes its system for storing emails. As I noted here, emails reside in user accounts on email servers:
The IRS email system runs on Microsoft Outlook. Each of the Outlook email servers are [sic] located at one of three IRS data centers. … For disaster recovery purposes, the IRS does a daily back-up of its email servers. … Prior to May 2013, these backups were retained on tape for six months, and then for cost efficiency, the back-up tapes were released for re-use. In May of last year, the IRS changed its policy and began storing rather than recycling its backup tapes.
Yes, I’ll bet they did! This is almost incredible. But wait, it gets worse. It turns out that each IRS employee, even senior managers like Lois Lerner, have ridiculously little space allotted to them on the un-backed up email servers:
Due to financial and practical considerations, the IRS has limited the total volume of email stored on its server by restricting the amount of email most individual users can keep in an inbox at any given time. …
Currently, the average individual employee’s email box limit is 500 megabytes, which translates to approximately 6,000 emails. … Prior to July 2011, the limit was lower, 150 megabytes or roughly 1,800 emails.
These are absurdly low limits. By way of comparison, the Power Line Gmail account currently contains 12,437 megabytes of material–83 times as much storage as was permitted to an IRS employee before July 2011. A senior employee like Lois Lerner would probably send or receive 1,800 emails in a few weeks at most, thereby exhausting (if the IRS’s account is believed) his or her allotted server capacity. At that point, the IRS reverted to manual document management. Seriously:
If an email user’s box gets close to capacity, the system sends a message to the user noting that soon the mailbox will become unable to send additional messages.
Given the tiny mailbox capacity, this must happen every few days.
When a user needs to create space in his or her email box, the user has the option of either deleting emails (that do not qualify as official records) or moving them out of the active email box (inbox, sent items, deleted items) to an archive. … Archived email is moved off the IRS email server and onto the employee’s hard drive on the employee’s individual computer. As a result, these IRS employees’ emails no longer exist in the active email box of the employee and are not backed-up as part of the daily backup of the email servers. Email moved to a personal archive of an employee exists only on the individual employee’s hard drive.
If this is true, it means that the IRS’s record-keeping is utterly inadequate. It has no systematic record of the decisions made and actions taken by IRS employees. Within six months, all centrally located and accessible email records–which, in today’s world, means more than 90% of the relevant documents–are gone. Records of the agency’s actions exist, after that time–if they exist at all–only on individual desktop or laptop computers, from which they cannot be accessed or reviewed in any efficient way. And forget about hard drive crashes, what happens when an employee gets a new computer, or is replaced by a new employee with his or her own computer? Are emails systematically copied from one computer to another so that the IRS will have a record of what the employee has done, assuming that the employee took the trouble to archive them in the first place? I doubt it.
My opinion of the federal government’s efficiency is not high, but I find it hard to believe that this is really how the IRS manages its records. I am not a tax lawyer, but I assume that any corporation subjected to an IRS audit, or any other kind of government investigation, that had this lousy a system of preserving records would be crucified.
That is all very interesting, but the question remains: did Lois Lerner really lose the only copies of her 2009-2011 emails in a hard drive crash? In its correspondence, the IRS tried to prove the point by attaching an email thread in which the agency’s IT professionals sadly advised Ms. Lerner that they had been unable to recover her missing files. But if you read to the end of the thread (i.e., the beginning) you see Lerner’s email of July 19, 2011, in which she laments the loss of “personal files” due to her computer’s crash, but never mentions any lost emails. Click to enlarge:
It is remarkable that Lerner does not say: “Oh no! My hard drive crashed, and the IRS’s only copy of two years’ worth of my highly important work has been lost!” No: she is concerned about “my lost personal files,” because “there were some documents in the files that are irreplaceable.” That is a clearly stated and entirely reasonable concern, but it has nothing to do with losing the agency’s only record of two years of work.
If this is the best the IRS can come up with, it has much more explaining to do.
‘Bombshell,’ as in a year old pop corn fart.
They really think we're stupid.
NOTE: I have MS Outlook .pst files on my hard drive. If my HD crashed, I'd lose my .pst files. But that doesn't change the fact that my emails are all stored in various other places by various other entities. It's all retrievable.
They just screwed Issa. Might as well kill the investigation. It is impossible to fight these hard core communists Democrats. Throw the witch in jail for contempt.
If the drive failed a new one would be installed and data restored from backup. Why was this data not restored? Such specified data from both “inbox” and “sent”?
Make them prove that a disk failure occurred. Seize the machine.
I don’t think it’s uncommon to overwrite daily backup tapes. However, backup strategy involves more than just a daily backup. Typically there are quarterly and annual backups of server data which is archived and kept off site for a long time.
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but the IRS explanation pretty much defies belief. What they are saying is that they only save emails for 6 months, then they are irretrievably lost, UNLESS, you store the emails on your computer.
The IRS can go back YEARS and ruin your life if you can’t produce the proper paperwork. But, you try to find their record of communications, it all stops at 6 months.
If this is true, which I doubt, people should go to jail over this.
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but the IRS explanation pretty much defies belief. What they are saying is that they only save emails for 6 months, then they are irretrievably lost, UNLESS, you store the emails on your computer.
The IRS can go back YEARS and ruin your life if you can’t produce the proper paperwork. But, you try to find their record of communications, it all stops at 6 months.
If this is true, which I doubt, people should go to jail over this.
In addition, most user profiles are also stored on a network in an enterprise environment so they can be backed up as well.
If the drive failed a new one would be installed and data restored from backup.
You would especially expect that to happen with someone that is in an important position as Ms. Lerner.
Everyone knows it’s one big lie.
SO basically if you get an email from the IRS, you can ignore it for 6 months and then say - “Email? You never sent me any email.....”
Moreover, the emails of top officials should be stored for ALL posterity, and not destroyed in the normal cycles. Three datacenters? The data is somewhere, Issa just needs to find it. The Techs know where it is, but are too dam afraid to say so. Just offer up 1 million$ to the source who comes forward with he data.
The IRS is putting out a lie which their sycophants in the media can repeat in unison, blocking out any reasonable discussion. The halfassed analysis fits any instance where the regime is called to question. The truly remarkable thing is that it always works.
The treasons are coming in such rapid succession now that no one can really keep track.
Yes, they need to man up, seize the servers, locate off-site backup location and lock it down.
C’mon IRS IT guys. Do the Snowden thing and come forward and be one of the good guys. You know this is wrong and a coverup.
“Ban Bombshell”
The Smoking Gun is in there. Obviously the entire conspiracy came directly from the White House.
Thumbing their nose at us, they are.
It took a year to come up with this little bit of plausible deniability but Lerner is not off the hook by any means. She is legally required to keep a hard copy of all IRS business correspondence that is not permanently archived.
1.10.3.2.3 (07-08-2011)
Emails as Possible Federal Records
1.All federal employees and federal contractors are required by law to preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency. Records must be properly stored and preserved, available for retrieval and subject to appropriate approved disposition schedules.
2.The Federal Records Act applies to email records just as it does to records you create using other media. Emails are records when they are:
•Created or received in the transaction of agency business
•Appropriate for preservation as evidence of the government’s function and activities, or
•Valuable because of the information they contain
3.If you create or receive email messages during the course of your daily work, you are responsible for ensuring that you manage them properly. The Treasury Department’s current email policy requires emails and attachments that meet the definition of a federal record be added to the organization’s files by printing them (including the essential transmission data) and filing them with related paper records. If transmission and receipt data are not printed by the email system, annotate the paper copy. More information on IRS records management requirements is available at http://erc.web.irs.gov/Displayanswers/Question.asp?FolderID=4&CategoryID=5 or see the Records Management Handbook, IRM 1.15.1 http://publish.no.irs.gov/IRM/P01/PDF/31421A03.PDF).
4.An email determined to be a federal record may eventually be considered as having historical value by the National Archivist prior to disposal. Therefore, ensure that all your communications are professional in tone.
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.
“If the drive failed a new one would be installed and data restored from backup. Why was this data not restored? Such specified data from both “inbox” and “sent”?”
I’m old and don’t know all this techie mumbo jumbo, so I asked my grandson to explain. He said it sounds like they’re using Exchange, which keeps the mailbox on the network, not the computer. If you lose your hard drive, all your mail is still in Exchange. Also, he mentioned that more important people usually have that mail limit raised because they do more emailing. So Lois Lane could have had 20-30,000 emails to keep.
If I could only keep 6000 emails, I would get rid or back up any of the unimportant stuff somehow, but keep the critical messages on my mailbox. Congress needs to get a couple of geeks in there to sift through the commie smoke and mirrors.
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