The thing is, Learner is a ditz. IMO there is no way she could have pulled that Drive from her desktop and figure out how to open it up and take her eyebrow tweezer to it. Which begs the question who did. Seems the IT folks didn’t want to go the extra mile at any point, so my guess is some low to mid level Nuts and Bolts IT guy(s) were given the directive. But Learner would have been working with someone higher up to hatch the plan.
An IT person responsible for data recovery recommended the drive be sent off to data recovery experts, but it wasn't. If the computer user tells IT they didn't lose anything important, they aren't going to send the drive off.
The hard drive crash should have been reported to the National Archives. It is not clear who is suppose to make the report. The IT people could make a report that it crashed, but wouldn't be able to say what important documents were lost. So I am guessing it was up to the computer user or their department to make the report.