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

[Bowfinger]

Correct it does not.

How can emails regarding active cases and regarding policy be considered anything but official records? Again, I'll point to the IRS site.

All of this pertains to the emails in question.

Exactly. They've had almost a year and we've seen nothing with respect to original printouts. That's pretty telling and any sane person could assume at this point that they don't exist. Why wouldn't they have been produced already if they did exist? It would at least keep Congress busy reading for quite some time if they had been.

You're still conflating fact with speculation. We don't know what those missing emails contained. We also don't know how many of them Lerner printed, nor do we know if those printed copies have already been provided to investigators. So far as the public knows, there has been no effort yet to cross reference the millions of pages of paper documents delivered with Lerner's electronic email copies. My expectation is there would be a tremendous amount of redundancy between them, i.e., investigators will get two copies of most documents, one paper and one electronic. Lerner's 2009-July, 2011 emails will only be paper. This is also mere speculation, however, and that's my point. We have more speculation than we have fact, and a lot of people fail to separate the two.

 

[fskimospy]

We have some XP machines due to old applications. That is what typically slows adoption of newer technologies. The inability to get funding or resistance to move past some accounting program written in 1993 and wont work on Vista, Windows 7 or 8s security model.

The defense sector is notoriously shitty about this, I remember us still using DOS and in one case an OS2(!) system because they knew it worked and didn't want to change.

Anyways, I largely agree with everything you said. Such a situation absolutely merits an investigation. I just find the presumption of a conspiracy to be absolutely ridiculous, given the information available.

 

[Bowfinger]

I wonder if the SEC would accept a financial institution "losing" financial records via a hard drive crash and failing to recover them via tape, then overwriting the tapes?

Give this lame argument a rest. Nobody is saying it's OK or that the IRS has handled their email infrastructure well. That doesn't change reality, however, and constantly complaining that "xyz couldn't get away with that" is empty noise. We agree the IRS handled email poorly.

 

[Attic]

We know that efforts were made to recover it, even enlisting outside help. Perhaps if they had thought the emails were important enough they would have recovered them, but at that time that wasn't the case.

Again, using myself as an example, if my hard drive crashed and I lost everything I'm sure the IT department would make an effort to get them back, but they certainly wouldn't move heaven and earth.

I have to assume that email archives would be considered in the limited areas of most important recovery efforts for which files to rebuild/extract using data retrieval software and methods. AFAIK, without physical damage, these items are always recoverable, albeit at varying levels of expense. The excuse for non recovery was not expense, it was Bad Sectors. But bad sectors in this context is nonsense, it's like taking a car to a mechanic because your tranny is broken and the car repair guy saying, "sorry, tranny is broken". Fixing it is possible/highly likey and that's what these places do.

I also assume the IRS knew the importance of those emails at minimum based on Lerner's position (not necessarily related at all to targeting), but also given we have Lerner later admitting to targeting taking place as well as inquires coming in about targeting from the outside before the hard drive crash. So we now know targeting was going on during the time frame in question and we know Lerner was in some manner aware of this at this time (before/during/after crash issue).

Proving my assumptions, sure, a different ball game, one i'm not qualified for.

 

[Genx87]

I have to assume that email archives would be considered in the limited areas of most important recovery efforts for which files to rebuild/extract using data retrieval software and methods. AFAIK, without physical damage, these items are always recoverable, albeit at varying levels of expense. The excuse for non recovery was not expense, it was Bad Sectors. But bad sectors in this context is nonsense, it's like taking a car to a mechanic because your tranny is broken and the car repair guy saying, "sorry, tranny is broken". Fixing it is possible/highly likey and that's what these places do.

I also assume the IRS knew the importance of those emails at minimum based on Lerner's position (not necessarily related at all to targeting), but also given we have Lerner later admitting to targeting taking place as well as inquires coming in about targeting from the outside before the hard drive crash. So we now know targeting was going on during the time frame in question and we know Lerner was in some manner aware of this at this time (before/during/after crash issue).

Proving my assumptions, sure, a different ball game, one i'm not qualified for.

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.

 

[Bowfinger]

I'm only claiming that there were no real efforts to recover the hard drive contents.

Email history is critical in any business, recovering them would have undergone a real recovery effort which would have recovered them.

Either the techs were completely incompetent or didn't try to recover the contents of the drive.

I assume you have no IT hardware experience. Your comments show significant technical ignorance. Many hard drive failures are recoverable. Many others simply are not. It depends on how and why the drive failed. If it was a true head crash, where one or more drive heads actually plowed the platter for multiple rotations, the drive may well be unrecoverable. On-board controller failures can also make a drive unrecoverable. It happens. I don't know as fact that it happened in Lerner's case, but I've seen it happen elsewhere.

 

[xBiffx]

You're still conflating fact with speculation. We don't know what those missing emails contained. We also don't know how many of them Lerner printed, nor do we know if those printed copies have already been provided to investigators. So far as the public knows, there has been no effort yet to cross reference the millions of pages of paper documents delivered with Lerner's electronic email copies. My expectation is there would be a tremendous amount of redundancy between them, i.e., investigators will get two copies of most documents, one paper and one electronic. Lerner's 2009-July, 2011 emails will only be paper. This is also mere speculation, however, and that's my point. We have more speculation than we have fact, and a lot of people fail to separate the two.

And I'm the one speculating? Take a look in the mirror and you'll find the one doing most of the speculating here. All I'm doing is pointing out the fact that policy wasn't followed and therefore laws were broken.

Unless you are going to try and say that two years of emails contained absolutely zero official records?

 

[Bowfinger]

And I'm the one speculating? Take a look in the mirror and you'll find the one doing most of the speculating here. All I'm doing is pointing out the fact that policy wasn't followed and therefore laws were broken.

Unless you are going to try and say that two years of emails contained absolutely zero official records?

Yes. I openly mark my speculation as speculation. You treat your speculation as fact. I assert "We don't know." You assert "policy wasn't followed and therefore laws were broken." You assert supposition as fact. That's the difference between us.

 

[TerryMathews]

Give this lame argument a rest. Nobody is saying it's OK or that the IRS has handled their email infrastructure well. That doesn't change reality, however, and constantly complaining that "xyz couldn't get away with that" is empty noise. We agree the IRS handled email poorly.

I'm not saying they handled it poorly. I'm saying they handled it criminally.

The SEC would shut down any bank smaller than the giant monster mega banks if this situation happened there.

 

[hal2kilo]

The defense sector is notoriously shitty about this, I remember us still using DOS and in one case an OS2(!) system because they knew it worked and didn't want to change.

Anyways, I largely agree with everything you said. Such a situation absolutely merits an investigation. I just find the presumption of a conspiracy to be absolutely ridiculous, given the information available.

Absolutely this shlould be investigated. That's obviously not the goal of this comittee though.

 

[xBiffx]

Yes. I openly mark my speculation as speculation. You treat your speculation as fact. I assert "We don't know." You assert "policy wasn't followed and therefore laws were broken." You assert supposition as fact. That's the difference between us.

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.

 

[Attic]

I assume you have no IT hardware experience. Your comments show significant technical ignorance. Many hard drive failures are recoverable. Many others simply are not. It depends on how and why the drive failed. If it was a true head crash, where one or more drive heads actually plowed the platter for multiple rotations, the drive may well be unrecoverable. On-board controller failures can also make a drive unrecoverable. It happens. I don't know as fact that it happened in Lerner's case, but I've seen it happen elsewhere.

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)

 

[fskimospy]

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.

I can't see how you could possibly come to that conclusion with the data available and your understanding of the IRS's internal workings.

 

[Jhhnn]

I can't see how you could possibly come to that conclusion with the data available and your understanding of the IRS's internal workings.

It's what he wants to believe, and that's all that really matters to him.

Truthiness & desire.

 

[Attic]

I can't see how you could possibly come to that conclusion with the data available and your understanding of the IRS's internal workings.

The IRS public story doesn't hold up against reasonable scrutiny. If the hard drive was important enough to send out for data retrieval (implying conscious knowledge of the drives importance), its contents would have been retrieved.

We all appear to agree the email was botched, whether it be the back-up method or the inability to retrieve emails after the crash. Incompetence excuse does not satisfy me for non retrieval of emails. The IRS is competent, I don't see a reason to selectively discover incompetence here to explain the email screw up. To me it's more logical they were competent and intentionally lost or intentionally did not retrieve the emails. The motive is clear given Lerner admitted to targeting groups.

The emails if found would have been beneficial for either innocence or guilt, given the emails were not found and IRS is now claiming innocence this is also leading to belief of tampering.

I'm rather stunned, remaining, anyone would believe this story from the IRS given the context and scope of the rest of the scandal and the timeline of events.

 

[hal2kilo]

The defense sector is notoriously shitty about this, I remember us still using DOS and in one case an OS2(!) system because they knew it worked and didn't want to change.

Anyways, I largely agree with everything you said. Such a situation absolutely merits an investigation. I just find the presumption of a conspiracy to be absolutely ridiculous, given the information available.

Don't get me started witrh custom government applications that suck, that you have to use daily that never gets up graded or fixed. I'm talking for the last ten years. The IETM browser comes to mind.

 

[Jhhnn]

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.

Maybe they need a budget that will support it. If Repubs can nail their other foot to the floor, they won't be able to function at all. It's kinda like the Gulag- give 'em 1200 calories a day & demand 1800 calories a day worth of work. Cut rations for poor performance.

 

[Genx87]

Maybe they need a budget that will support it. If Repubs can nail their other foot to the floor, they won't be able to function at all. It's kinda like the Gulag- give 'em 1200 calories a day & demand 1800 calories a day worth of work. Cut rations for poor performance.

Do you have proof the IRS requested funding for email retention and were denied?

 

[fskimospy]

The IRS public story doesn't hold up against reasonable scrutiny. If the hard drive was important enough to send out for data retrieval (implying conscious knowledge of the drives importance), its contents would have been retrieved.

As Genx87 and myself explained, this is not correct. There are lots of ways in which sending a drive over to IT would not have the data retrieved. If my hard drive crashed we would definitely send it over to IT for data retrieval. I am not at all confident such retrieval would occur.

We all appear to agree the email was botched, whether it be the back-up method or the inability to retrieve emails after the crash. Incompetence excuse does not satisfy me for non retrieval of emails. The IRS is competent, I don't see a reason to selectively discover incompetence here to explain the email screw up. To me it's more logical they were competent and intentionally lost or intentionally did not retrieve the emails. The motive is clear given Lerner admitted to targeting groups.

What is your basis for the claim that the IRS displays this type of competence in IT related issues? As best as I can tell you have none other than your gut impression of the IRS. Needless to say, that is woefully insufficient evidence for your conclusion.

The emails if found would have been beneficial for either innocence or guilt, given the emails were not found and IRS is now claiming innocence this is also leading to belief of tampering.

I'm rather stunned, remaining, anyone would believe this story from the IRS given the context and scope of the rest of the scandal and the timeline of events.

You have no idea whether or not the emails would have been beneficial either way, and more importantly there was no expectation that such emails would be subpoenaed when the hard drive crash occurred, and no evidence that their IT department or any other department was concerned about such a situation at that time.

So once again, I'm stunned that anyone would attempt to reach such a conclusion considering the evidence available. I'm not saying you're doing it on purpose, but it seems like motivated reasoning where your brain fills in the gaps with what you are already predisposed to believe.

 

[xBiffx]

Maybe they need a budget that will support it. If Repubs can nail their other foot to the floor, they won't be able to function at all. It's kinda like the Gulag- give 'em 1200 calories a day & demand 1800 calories a day worth of work. Cut rations for poor performance.

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.

 

[spidey07]

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

The Internal Revenue Service did not follow the law when it failed to report the loss of records belonging to a senior IRS executive, the nation's top archivist told Congress Tuesday.

"Any agency is required to notify us when they realize they have a problem," David Ferriero, archivist of the U.S. during a House Oversight and Government Reform committee hearing.

 

[fskimospy]

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.

Actually, audits by the IRS are down considerably in recent years.

 

[TerryMathews]

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

And, do you know what the archivists first response would've been upon notification?

"Do you have tape backups?"

Anyone with half a brain cell can see that systems were in place to mitigate a data loss event like this one & were simply not followed.

 

[xBiffx]

Actually, audits by the IRS are down considerably in recent years.

And? Any evidence that is due to lack of funds?

Its not surprising given the fact that, as it stands to date, it appears they can get away with whatever they want. Who's not going to make sure their paperwork is in order? Most feared agency of the federal government gaining in the fear department, losing in the audits and IT department so it seems.

 

[fskimospy]

And? Any evidence that is due to lack of funds?

Its not surprising given the fact that, as it stands to date, it appears they can get away with whatever they want. Most feared agency of the federal government gaining in the fear department, losing in the audits and IT department so it seems.

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.