IRS Scandal explodes. "no evidence that would support a criminal prosecution."

[xBiffx]

You said they had the money to keep going after people. Considering they are going after fewer people than before, it seems odd to complain about this. Additionally, isn't that the whole purpose of the IRS? Strange that people would complain about them doing the job that is their reason to exist.

I wasn't complaining about it. Hell, I welcome the fact that they aren't going after more people. Just merely stating that they haven't cited that the reason for reduced audits is due to lack of budget.

 

[Cozarkian]

http://www.usnews.com/news/politics...rs-head-says-no-laws-broken-in-loss-of-emails

Reading that article, here is my big problem with the lost emails:

Koskinen said there was no evidence that Lerner intentionally destroyed the emails. To the contrary, he said the IRS went to great lengths trying to retrieve lost documents on Lerner's computer, even sending it to the agency's forensic lab.

In 2011, the IRS had a policy of backing up emails on computer tapes, but the tapes were recycled every six months, Koskinen said.

Those two statements by Koskinen aren't compatible. Why go through great lengths when there was a simple solution? It doesn't take six months to discover a hard drive crash, so why didn't the IRS just ask to have the backup from right before the crash restored to a new hard drive?

Can we see the instructions to the forensic team? Were they instructed to do everything they can to restore the drive, or were they instructed to salvage what is easily and cheaply recoverable?

 

[CLite]

It amazes me in 2014 and our litigation climate when companies don't archive email. Some courts make it difficult for the party that cant produce emails. Some courts will regard lack of an email as proof what the other party said is true. If this were a litigation case the IRS could be up shit creek without a paddle.

Second I am curious about what they did in an attempt to recover said .pst. The companies I work for have lost a few hard drives over the last 15 years. We were always able to recover files using a 3rd party. Provided the platters of the hard drive aren't physically destroyed. These data recovery companies can get back most data. In our case they were always able to recover the data we needed.

I can see how some can bring up a conspiracy. 6 hard drives fail. Not a single one was able to have data recovered? Seems a bit far fetched to me. I am not saying there is proof of any conspiracy. Only that is some really wild aligning of the stars imo.

I would like to interject here that companies purposely wipe all records not required by law precisely because of the litigious environment. I personally know one of the largest companies in the world wipes all their employees hard drives of old files after a certain period of time and permanently deletes old emails. Needless to say these lawyer based guidelines completely piss off the people actually trying to do work.

 

[Bowfinger]

Reading that article, here is my big problem with the lost emails:

Those two statements by Koskinen aren't compatible. Why go through great lengths when there was a simple solution? It doesn't take six months to discover a hard drive crash, so why didn't the IRS just ask to have the backup from right before the crash restored to a new hard drive?

Can we see the instructions to the forensic team? Were they instructed to do everything they can to restore the drive, or were they instructed to salvage what is easily and cheaply recoverable?

The backup tapes were for servers, not desktops. Any email archived to desktop files is no longer on the mail server. Backup tapes could potentially be used to recover any email archived within the last six months (in this IRS example).

 

[Cozarkian]

The backup tapes were for servers, not desktops. Any email archived to desktop files is no longer on the mail server. Backup tapes could potentially be used to recover any email archived within the last six months (in this IRS example).

Ah, that makes sense. Except, there is still no indication they bothered to get the backup tapes when the hard drive failed. Maybe they still would have lost some data (including emails archived more than 6 months ago), but certainly they could have salvaged more information than they actually did.

 

[Bowfinger]

That's because I'm not speculating. The acting IRS commissioner (and others) has stated more than once that emails were lost. That is admitting to the fact that the IRS breached policy and therefore broke the law. Its not supposition when you have sworn testimony to back it up. I don't have to have a belief in anything, I, as well as Congress, are being told as much.

You're still doing it. The IRS has stated emails were lost in the disk crash, not that official records were lost. That is the key difference. You are speculating that those emails included official records, and that those official records had not been printed and filed. Your speculation may indeed be correct, but you don't know either of those claims to be fact. That is the point.

 

[Bowfinger]

Ah, that makes sense. Except, there is still no indication they bothered to get the backup tapes when the hard drive failed. Maybe they still would have lost some data (including emails archived more than 6 months ago), but certainly they could have salvaged more information than they actually did.

I agree that needs to be investigated further. There is at least one report that the IRS did NOT try to recover from tape. I can think of legitimate reasons that might be true, but it definitely needs to be explained. As you suggest, it might have recovered six months of the missing email.

 

[Atreus21]

The backup tapes were for servers, not desktops. Any email archived to desktop files is no longer on the mail server. Backup tapes could potentially be used to recover any email archived within the last six months (in this IRS example).

I heard that the IRS uses Symantec Enterprise Vault, or some other server-side archiving solution. Is that correct?

I haven't kept up to the minute on this, but it seems to me the person they should subpoena is not the Director of the IRS but the IT Director. Furthermore, the questions should be coming from someone with a background in IT.

 

[werepossum]

Wow, Werepossum has really lost it.

According to him we have an individual who knows that all the emails she has been writing on her work email account are part of a conspiracy with the White House to attack their political enemies but was so stupid as to do that on government computers anyway, but so savvy as to be able to engineer an irrecoverable hard drive crash to eliminate the evidence that appeared normal to the techs, only days after a letter was sent to someone else that primarily dealt with other issues, in anticipation of congressional subpoenas years later. Then, the rest of the IRS got in on the game and cancelled contracts, etc, all to hide these evil,conspiratorial emails.

Considering apparently she had the foresight to destroy things years in advance, why didn't she just use a private account or other means of communication that aren't so easily tracked or archived? By werepossum's conspiracy theory she has to be simultaneously a criminal mastermind and a moron.

It's funny that when confronted with contrary information he posts a huge list of links from right wing sites, not a single one of which has any actual evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever, and then declares that anyone who disagrees with his conclusion to be stupid or in on the conspiracy. Classic werepossum. He can't be wrong, everyone else is just evil.

Politico and the New York Times aren't left wing enough for you?

All this information is available from multiple sources with a little bit of digging.

Yep, and sadly it's not just Werepossum. They're putting a whole new level of crazy in wing-NUT. I especially enjoy this new "smoking gun" about suddenly cancelling the Sonasoft email archiving contract. Two days ago it was a routine IT change that nobody considered remarkable. Then one blogger tosses it into his catapult and within 24 hours it's all over the nutter bubble. Lerner loses a hard drive and this contract is suddenly cancelled!!! We got 'em!!! It's a conspiracy!!!

Never mind that it wasn't sudden. As one of Werepossum's own links points out, the contract wasn't renewed at the end of the federal fiscal year. That's completely unremarkable timing. Never mind that we don't know what the IRS switched to instead; the nutters have already decided Sonasoft was replaced with nothing, based on exactly nothing but their paranoia. I also love the theory that a Fortune 100 sized organization ($12B budget, more than 90K employees) would make a significant IT infrastructure change to cover up one disk crash, especially when just like Lerner, it was done months before anything really hit the fan. That is straight into Stewox territory, a level of delusion that denies any possibility of rational thought. This does not bode well for America.

They replaced it with nothing. Had they been following the law, all these emails would be preserved and we'd all be able to see how Lerner et al were merely trying to save babies and kittens from evil Republicans.

To me the amazing part is the absolute certainty that conservatives are the victims of executive sanctioned persecution. Based on remarkably little actual evidence they have decided that not only is this the truth, but that there can be no other answer and anyone who thinks otherwise is part of the evil conspiracy against him.

Whenever werepossum tries to go off on another screed about how reasonable he is and about how dishonest "proggies" are, all you need to do is look back at his ravings in threads like this. The guy is a nutcase.

And yet I still come down on the left maybe 40% of the time, whereas you are all proggie, all the time, no matter how dishonest you have to be to argue the point and make your side correct. Funny how that works, only those who rigidly adhere to the leftist line can be honest in your book.

 

[xBiffx]

You're still doing it. The IRS has stated emails were lost in the disk crash, not that official records were lost. That is the key difference. You are speculating that those emails included official records, and that those official records had not been printed and filed. Your speculation may indeed be correct, but you don't know either of those claims to be fact. That is the point.

They have stipulated that emails for two years were lost. Any reasonable person with half a brain can figure out those would include official records. Unless you are going to be obtuse enough to suggest that they selectively lost only non-official emails over that two year period?

So basically, saying I'm speculating here makes you look like a retard, or a hack.

Edit: Of course, the other explanation could be that Lerner and her cohorts weren't conducting any official business during that two year period. I can't deny that (actually it would vindicate some of those on the right) but then we've got a whole new shitstorm to endure. :hmm:

 

[werepossum]

I agree that needs to be investigated further. There is at least one report that the IRS did NOT try to recover from tape. I can think of legitimate reasons that might be true, but it definitely needs to be explained. As you suggest, it might have recovered six months of the missing email.

What's the point of investigating it? All the IRS has to do is claim the data are unrecoverable due to sunspots reflected off of Psamathe and you morons will fall in lockstep behind them.

 

[werepossum]

Having worked in a big IT department I suspect what happened is her hard drive failed. She asked for her files to be recovered. The IT depart used some freebie tool and said "sorry cant do anything for you". And that was that. The IT dept wouldn't have a clue about the investigation. And they were probably lazy in explaining there are expensive tools or 3rd parties that can recover the data. IT depts hate .psts. So to them losing one was no big deal.

Clearly this needs to be addressed. A department that requires strict records compliance on their customers(tax payers) shouldn't have such a horrible records retention policy themselves.

Addressed how? It was already the law, and the IRS' defense is that they were breaking the law. Somehow I don't think a making a new law to be ignored at their convenience is going to change matters. Above the law is above the law.

Well we can put that to bed. The IRS did break the law as explained ad nauseum to the denial of truth and fact by the warped mind of the liberal.

http://www.usnews.com/news/politics...rs-head-says-no-laws-broken-in-loss-of-emails

Funny that the headline URL contains "irs-head-says-no-laws-broken-in-loss-of-emails" when the article plainly states that the IRS didn't follow the law. I guess if you're a government agency there's some gray area between following the law and breaking the law. Call it paralleling the law.

Hey, laws are for the little people.

 

[Bowfinger]

It's rather extensive which is why i'm incredulous at the IRS story. Drive crash is a big deal in that it needs to be resolved quickly, not necessarily in that data retrieval is impossible/difficult.

When a hard drive crashes IME, it's always about email. Everything else critical is on servers/NAS. And the problem crashes, it's typically about email archives (often users can put this in places automated backups miss).

Every time a drive crashes where back-up was botched or otherwise not a simple resolution folks come to the call to recover not the hard drive for the hard drive, but the hard drive for the email. IME this is due to litigious nature of our country, emails recovered in most cases are to protect the owner and prove their intent/dealings/comms from some asshole who might go after them down the road.

In Lerner's case i'm of the mind the importance is implicit, there's no reasonable case to say those emails weren't important enough to be retrieved. So they would have been retrieved unless tampering was going on.

Edit: It wasn't a head crash or controller (still recoverable but more $$$), it was bad sectors (less $$$, more straightforward)

If seems to me your experience is far less "extensive" than you think. Perhaps in your company everything is on a server, but that's not true everywhere. As discussed earlier, many companies decide they can save money by relying on cheap PC hard drives for many files rather than expensive SAN or NAS space. That's a foolish policy in my opinion, and I've seen it changing over the last five years or so as companies got burned and SAN prices dropped, but it was not uncommon.

I'll also point out yet again that your opinion of what Lerner's email contained is speculation, not fact. The drive was important enough that she sent it to their forensics group for recovery. We don't know if she was trying to recover files, emails, or both.

Finally, I'd like to see a credible source for your claim that it was just lost sectors, and not a head crash or controller failure. That's news to me. I wasn't aware of anyone providing that level of detail. I'm also a bit confused as to how someone with your extensive experience thinks that bad sectors alone cannot explain the recovery failure. Are you sure you understand how disks and file systems work? IME, it's just like real estate. It's all about location, location, location. Bad sectors in the wrong spot, especially for data not stored in plaintext ASCII (e.g., a compressed archive), will make the affected file(s) effectively unrecoverable. The bigger the crash, the worse your odds.

 

[Bowfinger]

I heard that the IRS uses Symantec Enterprise Vault, or some other server-side archiving solution. Is that correct?

I haven't kept up to the minute on this, but it seems to me the person they should subpoena is not the Director of the IRS but the IT Director. Furthermore, the questions should be coming from someone with a background in IT.

I have no idea what the IRS uses for backup. I absolutely agree that investigators with the appropriate technical background should be talking to IRS IT to get the facts on this part of the story. Congress doesn't have the expertise, and neither do any of their witnesses, so far as I know.

 

[Bowfinger]

What's the point of investigating it? All the IRS has to do is claim the data are unrecoverable due to sunspots reflected off of Psamathe and you morons will fall in lockstep behind them.

Go play, Stewie. You have nothing useful to offer.

 

[spidey07]

Addressed how? It was already the law, and the IRS' defense is that they were breaking the law. Somehow I don't think a making a new law to be ignored at their convenience is going to change matters. Above the law is above the law.


Funny that the headline URL contains "irs-head-says-no-laws-broken-in-loss-of-emails" when the article plainly states that the IRS didn't follow the law. I guess if you're a government agency there's some gray area between following the law and breaking the law. Call it paralleling the law.

Hey, laws are for the little people.

I was waiting for the liberal to say "They didn't break any law, they just didn't follow the law". Double speak, attempt to control the language. It's SOP for the left.

 

[xBiffx]

I have no idea what the IRS uses for backup. I absolutely agree that investigators with the appropriate technical background should be talking to IRS IT to get the facts on this part of the story. Congress doesn't have the expertise, and neither to any of their witnesses, so far as I know.

There's something we can agree on, especially the bolded.

 

[Jhhnn]

Funny how the IRS has plenty of money and resources to keep going after people. But when it comes time to own up to some unscrupulous activity, they are fresh out of funds.

Your example is off. They were given 1200 calories a day and required 1200 calories a day of work but decided to go off and waste 600 calories on their own playing grab ass.

Lame Denial. How desperate is your will to believe, anyway?

 

[xBiffx]

Lame Denial. How desperate is your will to believe, anyway?

Well thought out retort. I don't have to believe anything, I'm just listening at this point. Curious how much you love the IRS and are willing to suck it down. Have you gotten to at least third base yet or is he still playing hard to get?

 

[Jhhnn]

I was waiting for the liberal to say "They didn't break any law, they just didn't follow the law". Double speak, attempt to control the language. It's SOP for the left.

Control the language? As if you're vaguely qualified to interpret federal statutes.

I'm not, but I'm not arrogant enough to think that I am, either.

Nor do I believe it's anybody's right to tear down the govt just because the voters didn't chose them to run it, either.

 

[OutHouse]

When a hard drive crashes IME, it's always about email. Everything else critical is on servers/NAS. And the problem crashes, it's typically about email archives (often users can put this in places automated backups miss).

ummm the email lives in a exchange server, the exchange server has a db file that has email from everybody assigned to that db. that db is not stored on one disk but across many in a Raid. example, i have my exchange servers fiber attached to 2 compellent SAN's that are about 80TB each spread across many rows of hard drives. So I really dont know why you are talking about a singular hard drive unless you are talking about a .pst file being stored on a local partition.

 

[Bowfinger]

They have stipulated that emails for two years were lost. Any reasonable person with half a brain can figure out those would include official records. Unless you are going to be obtuse enough to suggest that they selectively lost only non-official emails over that two year period?

So basically, saying I'm speculating here makes you look like a retard, or a hack.

Edit: Of course, the other explanation could be that Lerner and her cohorts weren't conducting any official business during that two year period. I can't deny that (actually it would vindicate some of those on the right) but then we've got a whole new shitstorm to endure. :hmm:

Or that Lerner (or more likely, her secretary) printed and filed anything that was an official record, so no official records were lost. It's funny how you conveniently missed that third option, even though I've spelled it out several times.

Look, if you want to say, "I cannot believe Lerner really printed and filed all those documents." I have no issue. You're welcome to your opinion, and in all honesty, I share it. I understand human nature. The problem is trying to assert your opinion as if it is fact. That has been the bane of this story from day one.

 

[Jhhnn]

Well thought out retort. I don't have to believe anything, I'm just listening at this point. Curious how much you love the IRS and are willing to suck it down. Have you gotten to at least third base yet or is he still playing hard to get?

Ooooh! Deeper into denial. It's not about me.

It's not necessary to lie- just admit that you believe, then explain why. The last part needs to make sense.

Remember, never attribute to malice what can be accounted for by incompetence, equipment failure or lack of resources.

Go for it.

 

[Bowfinger]

ummm the email lives in a exchange server, the exchange server has a db file that has email from everybody assigned to that db. that db is not stored on one disk but across many in a Raid. exmaple, i have my exchange servers fiber attached to 2 compellent SAN's that are about 80TB each spread across many rows of hard drives. So I really dont know why you are talking about a singular hard drive unless you are talking about a .pst file being stored on a local partition.

We're talking about the single hard drive on Lerner's PC, where she stored her archived email. This has been covered extensively.

 

[xBiffx]

Or that Lerner (or more likely, her secretary) printed and filed anything that was an official record, so no official records were lost. It's funny how you conveniently missed that third option, even though I've spelled it out several times.

Look, if you want to say, "I cannot believe Lerner really printed and filed all those documents." I have no issue. You're welcome to your opinion, and in all honesty, I share it. I understand human nature. The problem is trying to assert your opinion as if it is fact. That has been the bane of this story from day one.

What part of lost do you not understand? Let me get it through your, retarded or hack, brain.

lost
lôst,läst

denoting something that has been taken away or cannot be recovered.

If they had paper copies of those emails, surely almost a year is enough time to produce said copies. Barring that, the acting IRS commissioner has testified that the emails in question are lost meaning gone, kaput, on hiatus, unrecoverable, finished, done. Get it? You don't need to answer that, we already know what the answer is.