Posted on 07/18/2017 1:25:45 PM PDT by TigerClaws
The IRS failed to adequately store, backup, and search official records for use in Freedom of Information requests and other litigation, according to a new report released by the Treasury Inspector General of Tax Administration. Performing an independent audit, TIGTA found:
The IRS’s current e-mail system and record retention policies do not ensure that e-mail records are saved and can be searched and retrieved for as long as needed. Additionally, repeated changes in electronic media storage policies, combined with a reliance on employees to maintain records on computer hard drives, has resulted in cases in which Federal records were lost or unintentionally destroyed.
In particular, the IRS destroyed laptops containing critical records – even when those records were requested for use in pending litigation. In one instance, TIGTA notes:
We found that when an employee separated from the IRS in August 2014, the employee left his laptop with his secretary. That employee was under a litigation hold to ensure that relevant evidence was preserved for use in litigation. However, without a policy in place to ensure that laptops of separating employees under litigation holds were maintained, that laptop was sent to the IT organization for standard sanitization and disposal.
After Lois Lerner’s hard drive crashed in 2011, the hard drive was shredded into quarter-size pieces and sold for scrap. In the process, 24,000 Lerner emails – which may have shed light on the IRS conservative targeting scandal – were lost.
Even when the IRS updated its policies and began saving employee hard drives, it failed to record who had used which hard drives. “Without this correlation,” reports TIGTA, “successfully completing a search for specific e-mail or other electronic information residing on a disposed hard drive would be highly unlikely and could result in destroyed records.”
Although the IRS stores 32,000 laptops and hard drives, it does not keep a detailed inventory. “This condition makes it difficult for the IRS to locate the electronic records of separated employees if needed to respond to FOIA requests or other official inquiries,” writes TIGTA.
This lack of an inventory reduces government transparency by making it impossible for taxpayers to exercise their rights guaranteed by the Freedom of Information Act. Nonetheless, the IRS continues to store thousands of laptops full of inaccessible information – even as it purchases new laptops that will eventually end up in the same place. Not only does the IRS violate taxpayer rights, but it does so in a way that wastes taxpayer dollars.
Upon publication of the TIGTA report, Rep. Kevin Brady, Sen. Orrin Hatch, and Rep. Vern Buchanan sent a letter urging IRS Commissioner John Koskinen to remedy the agency’s failed electronic recordkeeping procedures. The legislators write:
The lack of an electronic mail system that is compliant with Federal records management requirements and could allow the IRS to retain and search the records of current and separated employees is unacceptable. Failure to retain and produce records reduces transparency, inhibits Congressional oversight, and opens the IRS to judicial sanctions during litigation. TIGTA's findings are also symptomatic of the IRS's shambolic information technology modernization efforts.
In addition to losing and destroying employee hard drives, the IRS also fails to back up sensitive emails to a shared network drive. “Although interim policy requires that e-mail be archived for IRS executives,” TIGTA notes, “we found four executives from our sample of 20 who were not archiving e-mails as instructed. All four were members of the IRS Senior Executive Team.” TIGTA also cites a 2016 report by User and Network Services identifying “23 executives whose e-mail accounts were not configured to archive their e-mail when they assumed their executive position.”
Although federal law requires government agencies to honor FOIA requests within 20 days, the report says that some FOIA cases at the IRS took as long as 2.5 years to close. Reviewing a sample of 35 FOIA cases, TIGTA found that 30 cases took longer than the required 20-day limit, and the average case took 212 days to close.
Even when the IRS closes an FOIA case, there is no certainty that they attempted to search for all relevant records. Examining a sample of 30 closed FOIA cases, TIGTA found:
The IRS did not follow its own policies that require it to document which employees searched for responsive records and what criteria were used in the search. Without this information, the PGLD [Privacy, Governmental Liaison, and Disclosure] office was unable to document that an adequate search was performed.
In addition, our case review found four instances in which the IRS did not search for all responsive records.
It is particularly unlikely that the IRS will search the computer of a separated employee – even if that computer contains information that pertains to a FOIA request. TIGTA says:
IRS efforts in response to requests for records do not consistently search records of separated employees. For example, in one of the litigation cases we examined, the IRS did not search for records associated with one of 11 employees who had separated. In October 2014, the Department of Justice, on behalf of the IRS, filed a document with the court stating that 11 former IRS employees’ laptop hard drives were “likely unavailable” for electronic discovery of evidence. However, in our search, we found that, according to the IRS inventory system, one hard drive was listed as in-stock at the time the court document was filed and thus could have been searched to determine if records were still available.
Previous testimony from TIGTA revealed that the IRS failed to search five of six possible sources for Lois Lerner’s emails. If anything, the TIGTA report reveals that the loss of the Lerner emails was not a unique incident. The IRS has consistently failed to store, backup, and search employee hard drives and email exchanges, and taxpayers have consequently been prevented from accessing critical federal records.
Read more: http://www.atr.org/irs-destroyed-laptops-containing-critical-records-says-inspector-general#ixzz4nDVeJEpG Follow us: @taxreformer on Twitter
All pure BS!
This could be stopped so easily. They may not be able to stop the willful destruction of the computers, but they sure as hell can create laws and regulations that punish those who carry out the actual destruction and/or those who allow it to happen.
Fire Sessions!!!
And I’m sure DJT can just answer a subpoena for electronic records by saying “oh, sorry, all the laptops we used during that time period have been destroyed,” and the MSM-Democrats will simply shrug their shoulders and say “oh well, let’s move on.”
If you work anywhere in the government swamp you can do any damn thing you want and you will never be held accountable, like go to jail, fined, fired, lose your pension. Nothing. Laws are meaningless.
I accidentally destroyed my records that show that I donated $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation last year. Unfortunately, my backups were also lost. I’m sure that this slight glitch will not impact my taking the full amount as a charitable deduction, with the blessing of the IRS.
Riiiiight.
The IRS is as corrupt as they come. I respect my local swamp rat more than I respect any government institution, save for the military, which still manages to have moral decent folks.
And If: East coast marshmallow major grad
Then: Most pribably hired as an incompetent, immoral and untrustworthy gubmit employee.
Period.
And dat’s da twuth.
The game is rigged in favor of government and against the citizens. That's the "standard"
Why oh why is Koskinen still in place? A lot of this crap has become totally maddening.
Would North Korea do us all a favor and just PLEASE nuke D.C. already??
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but there are already thousands of pages of laws covering the preservation of government information, government documents, government computers, government servers, government hard drives, and government work-product.
There are literally billions of dollars worth of systems in place to back up, store, archive, save, preserve, protect, catalog, and render safe government data in every department of the government.
Unfortunately, when a Democrat administration is in office, those laws are ignored, and ignored with impunity. No one working in the government has the slightest fear of being caught, or even detected, breaking those laws millions of times. They know they won't be held to account by the agencies that are supposed to be watching out for the taxpayer's interest, and they think the whole thing is a total joke.
Hillary is like Kim jung il. Her people adore her and she can do no wrong. She is above the law, above the constitution and, thanks to the real God, her adorers are not the majority and she is not in the White House
She would have been running this country as a full blown dictatorship.
This is the reason, these destroyed laptops, by the people who take one third of our hard earned money and say ‘we have no respect for you nor your money, this reminder is WHY we can’t give a crap about anything the media or acadamia says about some hotel lobby how ya doing between trump and Russians
We avoided a dictatorship. The pro dictatorship ignorami are mad. They believe they’d have been safe from the effects of this level of shameless corruption
Ijuts
Obammy’s federal gub mint was dirty
Filthy; however, this crap has been in place for a very long time.
...and we still have an IRS?
BOOKMARK - Destruction of Evidence
Spoliation
somebody needs to be prosecuted
Abolishment Ping.
sooo, how many arrests have been made?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.