Lois Lerner's Emails Lost

[sunmaster14]

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.

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.

 

[Silly Green Monkey]

Who? What? An agency on government-funding didn't have the resources available to a commercial company?

 

[crescent]

.... that the IRS had an archival policy which was clearly designed to reduce transparency and impede internal investigations.

Or, that the agency lacked funding to develop and maintain an email system that would be standard in the private sector.

 

[Unabogie]

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.

Unless of course there were contemporaneous emails describing the computer failure. Oh, wait!

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/06/yet-another-irs-scandal-isnt

Nothing here sets off alarm bells to me. The key question, I think, is whether the IRS has contemporaneous documents showing that Lerner's computer crashed in 2011 and attempts to recover her hard drive failed. And they do. This is well before the scandal broke, so it would take a pretty Herculean brand of conspiracy theorizing to imagine that this was somehow related to the scandal. Either Lerner deliberately crashed her hard drive because she suspected her actions might prompt an investigation two years later, or else the IRS has faked a bunch of emails from 2011 between Lerner and the IT team trying to recover her hard drive.

There's also, as Steve Benen points out, the fact that Congress is mostly concerned with Lerner's behavior in the election year of 2012. If the IRS were involved in a cover-up, faking a hard drive crash that destroyed emails from 2010 and 2011 is a pretty incompetent way of doing it.

 

[elbe]

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).

I don't know what their requirements are but that's not particularly surprising. The company I work for (insurance industry) has a 6 month retention and attempts to limit email space (growth is an issue for us). Depending on the age of the computer infrastructure they may have found 6 months to be an effective period. Interestingly, because of our contract we have to, legally, effectively destroy our backups after 6 months (or whatever the specified retention period is). Retaining any could put us in a legal position we don't want to be in. IT is crazy that way.

 

[Newtons Bit]

Are you two trying to find an argument that an agency with an IT budget of over $10,000/employee/year can't store more than 500mb of emails because it doesn't have enough funding?

 

[elbe]

Are you two trying to find an argument that an agency that has an IT budget of over $10,000/employee/year can't store more than 500mb of emails because it doesn't have enough funding?

Well I wasn't, I was pointing out that those restrictions aren't particularly out of the ordinary. They may also just be out of date, set up when drive and backup space was more expensive than it is now and the policy just hasn't been updated. My company has devices that can expand be expanded into the petabyte range but we still have a 6 month retention.

 

[Silly Green Monkey]

Are you two trying to find an argument that an agency with an IT budget of over $10,000/employee/year can't store more than 500mb of emails because it doesn't have enough funding?

Is that a sufficient budget to track emails and all other data for hundreds of millions of citizens?

 

[Newtons Bit]

Is that a sufficient budget to track emails and all other data for hundreds of millions of citizens?

I think you're confusing the IRS with the NSA.

 

[elbe]

I think you're confusing the IRS with the NSA.

I'm not sure if you're making a joke or not...

The IRS should be backing up both internal IT data and "customer" data, otherwise known as tax data for all American taxpayers. Depending on their structure they may seperate them, in which case internal IT probably gets the short stick, but either way it makes it hard to judge exactly what the funding needs of a modern network infrastructure and backup system would be.

 

[Newtons Bit]

Well I wasn't, I was pointing out that those restrictions aren't particularly out of the ordinary. They may also just be out of date, set up when drive and backup space was more expensive than it is now and the policy just hasn't been updated. My company has devices that can expand be expanded into the petabyte range but we still have a 6 month retention.

I wasn't referring to yoooooooou. Seriously though, I spent entirely too long crafting my post and should have made it clear who I was referring to.

 

[Mike!]

I think you're confusing the IRS with the NSA.

Speaking of the NSA, why not just ask them for a copy of the emails?

 

[Newtons Bit]

I'm not sure if you're making a joke or not...

Yes, in regards to the ambiguity of whose emails the IRS is storing...

The IRS should be backing up both internal IT data and "customer" data, otherwise known as tax data for all American taxpayers. Depending on their structure they may seperate them, in which case internal IT probably gets the short stick, but either way it makes it hard to judge exactly what the funding needs of a modern network infrastructure and backup system would be.

I see what you're saying, and that's similar to the point I'm making. It is entirely possible that the IRS has decided that the importance of additional email backup and storage is nil, like you have said, however, an argument that congress has failed to budget enough funds for the this kind of IT operation (maybe $10/year/employee? storage is cheap) is ridiculous.

In 2011, the year the emails were allegedly lost, the IRS had an "Information Services" budget of $1.8 billion dollars and an additional $263 million for "Business Systems Modernization". That is a lot of money for 96,000 employees. Almost $20,000/employee.

 

[ravdin]

I think a good rule of thumb is that if the government wouldn't accept a particular excuse from us, we shouldn't accept it from them.

 

[Giz]

I think a good rule of thumb is that if the government wouldn't accept a particular excuse from us, we shouldn't accept it from them.

A very reasonable point.

 

[sunmaster14]

Unless of course there were contemporaneous emails describing the computer failure. Oh, wait!

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/06/yet-another-irs-scandal-isnt

Oh, I'm sure the hard disk failure happened. What I'm not sure about is whether it was used as a convenient excuse to not produce incriminating emails. For example, suppose incriminating emails from, say, early 2011 were found, and higher-ups fretted about turning these over to evil Republicans in Congress. Then fortuitously they happened upon emails describing a hard disk failure. What do you think they would do?

In any case, the idea of relying on a user's local hard disk as archival storage is so ridiculous as to be prima facie evidence of corruption.

One last point. Why did it take so long for the IRS to tell Congress that the emails were missing? They were asked to provide all of Lois Lerner's emails 9 months ago, and the demand was repeated more forcefully in March. It doesn't seem like it would take longer than a couple of days to realize that the IRS doesn't store emails older than six months and that Lois Lerner's current hard drive had nothing from earlier than mid-2011. My suspicion is that they spent the intervening time trying to determine what was incriminating and what wasn't.

 

[Unabogie]

I think a good rule of thumb is that if the government wouldn't accept a particular excuse from us, we shouldn't accept it from them.

I'm reasonably certain that IRS employees have to keep their tax returns for 3 years as well. As for the substance of this "bombshell", I already noted that the computer problem happened in 2011, the alleged malfeasance happened in 2012, and the computer problem has contemporaneous support in the form of emails between Lerner and her IT people about the crashed computer and her lost emails.

Perhaps she used the same time machine Barack Obama used to plant that birth announcement?

IRS rules say they have to back up their emails for six months, which they did, and they've given the witch hunters Issa's committee all of their emails for 2012. Issa is now demanding emails that only existed on personal machines, and Lerner's had a documented crash in 2011, and that's all there is to it.

 

[Unabogie]

Oh, I'm sure the hard disk failure happened. What I'm not sure about is whether it was used as a convenient excuse to not produce incriminating emails. For example, suppose incriminating emails from, say, early 2011 were found, and higher-ups fretted about turning these over to evil Republicans in Congress. Then fortuitously they happened upon emails describing a hard disk failure. What do you think they would do?

In any case, the idea of relying on a user's local hard disk as archival storage is so ridiculous as to be prima facie evidence of corruption.

So it's a conspiracy!!! How deep does it go???

One last point. Why did it take so long for the IRS to tell Congress that the emails were missing? They were asked to provide all of Lois Lerner's emails 9 months ago, and the demand was repeated more forcefully in March. It doesn't seem like it would take longer than a couple of days to realize that the IRS doesn't store emails older than six months and that Lois Lerner's current hard drive had nothing from earlier than mid-2011. My suspicion is that they spent the intervening time trying to determine what was incriminating and what wasn't.

Because the emails didn't exist on backup, and they didn't exist on Lerner's old computer which failed in 2011. So they obviously tried to see if any of the recipients had copies, and those people are not even necessarily working at the IRS. And those people have actual missions to perform that are far more important than a witch hunt that everyone already knows is a phony scandal.

That's why. But keep on JAQing off. It's sure to pay off some day.

 

[elbe]

One last point. Why did it take so long for the IRS to tell Congress that the emails were missing? They were asked to provide all of Lois Lerner's emails 9 months ago, and the demand was repeated more forcefully in March. It doesn't seem like it would take longer than a couple of days to realize that the IRS doesn't store emails older than six months and that Lois Lerner's current hard drive had nothing from earlier than mid-2011. My suspicion is that they spent the intervening time trying to determine what was incriminating and what wasn't.

Ignoring the obvious natural partisan bias, as an IT person I've spent time digging through extended locations looking to find some copy of files that may not be on the primary backup. It's easy to say "we keep backups for six months" but if something is important you might want to look to see if anything has survived anywhere else. Did someone copy a file elsewhere? Send it to someone else? Did it survive on a backup but in an unexpected location? Users do weird things with their data and file recovery isn't always as simple as looking where it's supposed to be.

 

[Ziggurat]

I'm reasonably certain that IRS employees have to keep their tax returns for 3 years as well. As for the substance of this "bombshell", I already noted that the computer problem happened in 2011, the alleged malfeasance happened in 2012, and the computer problem has contemporaneous support in the form of emails between Lerner and her IT people about the crashed computer and her lost emails.

No. You are wrong. There is contemporaneous support for her hard drive crashing. But there is no contemporary support (at least no public) for emails having been lost in that crash. In fact, the records only make mention of "personal files" (Lerner's own words, see the last page of this document), it makes no mention of the loss of any work-related files. Were there work-related files lost in that crash? It's possible. But contrary to your claim, there is no record of that.