The IRS last Friday (natch) finally told Congress that it couldn't recover over two years worth of emails from Lois Lerner, from early 2009 to mid-2011. In its explanation of the way archiving works at the IRS, it's clear that we can't really be sure that a complete record of emails exists for any IRS employee prior to December 2012. Backup tapes for the email server are reused after six months, and the only copies which exist are those the user stored locally.
Backups are destroyed after six months? Only 500MB allocated for each user's account? This archival procedure is nothing short of willfully negligent. In the finance industry, every email, chat, and text must be archived for 7 years, and not by the user on his local hard drive (where the user usually has the power to selectively delete any file).
The explanation for the missing emails of course is that Lois Lerner's hard drive crashed in mid-2011, and that the data was unrecoverable. Color me skeptical (hey, it's a skeptic's forum). Not that the hard drive crashed, but that this is the primary reason for the failure to produce the subpoenaed emails.
Anyway, this is a remarkable development. Just to show you how on top of this story the mainstream news media is, I did a google search: "lois lerner emails site:nytimes.com" and came up with two brief articles, one a paragraph from a blog that nobody reads, and the other a brief article which appeared today on page A17 of the print version (it was online yesterday).
I'm not really sure which is more important: the likelihood that the IRS is engaged in a cover-up of damaging emails involving Lois Lerner; or that the IRS had an archival policy which was clearly designed to reduce transparency and impede internal investigations.
Quote:
Prior to the eruption of the IRS controversy last spring, the IRS had a policy of backing up the data on its email server (which runs Microsoft Outlook) every day. It kept a backup of the records for six months on digital tape, according to a letter sent from the IRS to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). After six months, the IRS would reuse those tapes for newer backups. So when Congressional committees began requesting emails from the agency, its records only went back to late 2012. The IRS also had two other policies that complicated things. The first was a limit on how big its employees' email inboxes could be. At the IRS, employees could keep 500 megabytes of data on the email server. If the mailbox got too big, email would need to be deleted or moved to a local folder on the user's computer. |
Backups are destroyed after six months? Only 500MB allocated for each user's account? This archival procedure is nothing short of willfully negligent. In the finance industry, every email, chat, and text must be archived for 7 years, and not by the user on his local hard drive (where the user usually has the power to selectively delete any file).
The explanation for the missing emails of course is that Lois Lerner's hard drive crashed in mid-2011, and that the data was unrecoverable. Color me skeptical (hey, it's a skeptic's forum). Not that the hard drive crashed, but that this is the primary reason for the failure to produce the subpoenaed emails.
Anyway, this is a remarkable development. Just to show you how on top of this story the mainstream news media is, I did a google search: "lois lerner emails site:nytimes.com" and came up with two brief articles, one a paragraph from a blog that nobody reads, and the other a brief article which appeared today on page A17 of the print version (it was online yesterday).
I'm not really sure which is more important: the likelihood that the IRS is engaged in a cover-up of damaging emails involving Lois Lerner; or that the IRS had an archival policy which was clearly designed to reduce transparency and impede internal investigations.
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