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

[Bowfinger]

......

So your crippled little mind can't even muster up a single word this time, and you have to resort to pictures. You are a special child.



Fail, indeed.

 

[Bowfinger]

I am still trying to understand how failure of PC hard drivers would result in loss of e-mails. The e-mails should be on servers with redundant storage systems. Even if a user copies a e-mail locally the original e-mail should be retained on E-mail servers for at least 7-years. At my work we retain all e-mails even if a user deletes a e-mail they are still archived for 7-years. Either there was a deliberate attempt to destroy evidence or the entire e-mail messaging system at the IRS needs to be overhauled. The IRS is demanded that companies retain e-mails for a longer time than apparently IRS does.

I think most IT pros agree that's how it should be done. Unfortunately, that's not how the IRS did it (and at least two other giant companies I've worked with in the past). Instead they impose a strict size limit on your server mailbox (150 MB in the IRS' case, though it was later raised to 500 MB). When your mailbox got full, you either deleted old mail or you archived it to your local PC drive. Lerner was archiving old mail on her PC drive and lost it when her drive failed.

 

[Bowfinger]

Everyone remember that Sonasoft email archiving contract that the IRS purportedly canceled right after Lerner's drive crashed? You know, the story earlier this week that exploded overnight throughout the nutter disinformation bubble, and was touted as the smoking gun that proved this was an Obama conspiracy to destroy evidence? Yeah, not so much.

Here's a press release from Sonasoft:

Sonasoft Clarifies Its Position Regarding IRS and Sonasoft's Email Archiving Products

Sonasoft Corp. clarifies its position regarding Sonasoft’s email archiving products and the IRS. Sonasoft does not have IRS email; Sonasoft never had access to IRS email.
San Jose, California (PRWEB) June 25, 2014

Sonasoft Corp., a leader in enterprise-class email archiving and eDiscovery tools, clarifies its role with the IRS and Sonasoft’s email archiving services. Sonasoft does not have IRS email. Sonasoft never had access to IRS email.

“We have a strong presence with the public sector as part of our customer base, which at one time included as a customer the IRS Counsel Division. Sonasoft has earned a strong clientele with, among others, school districts, counties and city governments, which appreciate our affordable email archiving solutions that outperform their expectations,” said Andy Khanna, President and CEO of Sonasoft.
[ ... ]
“In regards to the IRS as one of Sonasoft’s customers, it is true that one Division within the IRS was Sonasoft’s customer from 2005 to 2011,” clarified Andy Khanna. “This Division was the IRS Counsel. The main branch of the IRS did not use Sonasoft’s software for its operations; only the IRS Counsel used our SonaExchange software, which is a Microsoft Exchange Server replication solution. This particular software allowed the IRS Counsel to replicate the email data by copying it to a remote server for disaster recovery and business continuity as a failover copy to take over if the main system failed. In the event that a client’s Microsoft Exchange Server went down, then end users could access the replicated data on the Microsoft Exchange Server quickly and efficiently. The IRS Counsel Division stopped using Sonasoft’s replication software in 2011.”

“To further clarify, no Division within IRS ever used Sonasoft’s email archiving software. Only a Division within the IRS used any Sonasoft product and that was our email replication software, not our archiving or backup software,” said Andy Khanna. ...

TL;DR -- Yet another fizzle. The nutter media duped the flock yet again.

 

[spidey07]

....

Your stupid bitch ass should be banned.

To be clear.

The democrat is ok with this treason.

Act as one must.

 

[Brovane]

I think most IT pros agree that's how it should be done. Unfortunately, that's not how the IRS did it (or at least two other giant companies I've worked with in the past). Instead they impose a strict size limit on your server mailbox (150 MB in the IRS's case, though it was later raised to 500 MB). When your mailbox got full, you either deleted old mail or you archived it to your local PC drive. Lerner was archiving old mail on her PC drive and lost it when her drive failed.

That is how where I worked we used to do it. By 2007 we had implemented a e-mail archiving system. Also even before these the users placed archived e-mail on there home drive on the network so a loss of a users PC would never result in a loss of e-mail. Doesn't Sarbanes-Oxley require the retention of e-mail for a minimum of 5-years?

 

[Bowfinger]

That is how where I worked we used to do it. By 2007 we had implemented a e-mail archiving system. Also even before these the users placed archived e-mail on there home drive on the network so a loss of a users PC would never result in a loss of e-mail. Doesn't Sarbanes-Oxley require the retention of e-mail for a minimum of 5-years?

I don't remember, though I doubt the IRS falls under SOX jurisdiction. The IRS is required to follow federal "official record" preservation regulations, however, and that's an open question. The IRS policy is that any email that qualifies as an official record must be printed and the paper copy retained (with an exception for email stored in an approved record keeping system, or something like that -- N/A in this case). We don't yet know if Lerner followed this paper procedure properly or not.

 

[Matt1970]

I take it you have no computer experience? Those seven drives crashed over a three-year period. While it's hard to calculate a failure rate without knowing the size of the sample set, losing a couple of PC-quality drives per year doesn't seem at all out of line. Indeed it sounds so perfectly normal that I'd say only the most delusional idiot could believe it was proof of destroying evidence. And you do.

Ya, actually it does. I have been doing break/fix computer repair for 17 years and I have yet to have a client even come close to having seven drives crashed over a three-year period, much less catastrophic failures where no data is recoverable.

 

[Matt1970]

I think most IT pros agree that's how it should be done. Unfortunately, that's not how the IRS did it (and at least two other giant companies I've worked with in the past). Instead they impose a strict size limit on your server mailbox (150 MB in the IRS' case, though it was later raised to 500 MB). When your mailbox got full, you either deleted old mail or you archived it to your local PC drive. Lerner was archiving old mail on her PC drive and lost it when her drive failed.

At some point you have to finally see this. Ask her to testify, pleads the fifth. Ask her for records, hard drive crashed seven times. Ok, backups should have it. 500MB limit. And in the world of professional emails devoid of pictures and BS, 500MB is still a hell of a lot of emails. Ok, printouts then. Didn't happen. This is increasingly getting harder and harder to explain away as faux scandals.

 

[WackyDan]

I take it you have no computer experience? Those seven drives crashed over a three-year period. While it's hard to calculate a failure rate without knowing the size of the sample set, losing a couple of PC-quality drives per year doesn't seem at all out of line. Indeed it sounds so perfectly normal that I'd say only the most delusional idiot could believe it was proof of destroying evidence. And you do.

At my last four jobs over the last 14 years all email was on the server with potential for local working copy and archives... Be it a Domino mail server or Exchange.

We had our own server archives/backups and pretty much every email that came in was archived. If an employee deleted an email it was still there for posterity just in case HR needed it to terminate them, or in the later years in case we had to dig back years to accommodate a legal investigation/audit. Point is, that is nothing new at all.

Your point about the drives is correct. However the IRS statement that they sent it to HP and to their own IRS Criminal unit for forensic recovery and couldn't retrieve anything is bunk to me. They claim every sector on the drive was bad. The likelihood of that happening where every sector on the drive is bad and data could not be recovered is pretty rare.

EDIT: I just saw the statement from that archiver that they never had access to archive the IRS mail, but were replicating the mail servers. So I stand somewhat corrected from my statement below. Still makes you wonder why they weren't even compliant with gov't standards.

Coupled with their cancellation of a contract with a data archival company that stored their archived mail and you can see why something smells. I've sold to federal, state and commercial accounts both hardware and software for some of the largest IT companies in the industry... and I still do. You simply do not cancel that sort of service and leave yourself non-compliant. You also do not cancel that service without retaining the data from that vendor or having a net new vendor contract in place. I've seen people let their AV maintenance as well other platforms lapse for a period of time as they had perpetual vs term licenses, but those would be the exceptions and not normal for a critical service that was backing up or archiving data.

 

[Bowfinger]

Ya, actually it does. I have been doing break/fix computer repair for 17 years and I have yet to have a client even come close to having seven drives crashed over a three-year period, much less catastrophic failures where no data is recoverable.

At some point you have to finally see this. Ask her to testify, pleads the fifth. Ask her for records, hard drive crashed seven times. Ok, backups should have it. 500MB limit. And in the world of professional emails devoid of pictures and BS, 500MB is still a hell of a lot of emails. Ok, printouts then. Didn't happen. This is increasingly getting harder and harder to explain away as faux scandals.

You seem to have your facts confused, or your writing is exceptionally sloppy.

First, do you understand that it wasn't Lerner who had seven drive crashes, it was seven different IRS employees who each had one drive crash? Also, so far it's only Lerner's drive that was called unrecoverable. We have no information about recovery attempts on the other six drives.

Second, the IRS limit on mailbox size is well documented. I saw it in one of their official policy manuals, for example, linked earlier in this thread. It may not make sense to you, but it's the reality.

Third, the limit was apparently only 150 MB at the time of Lerner's crash. It was later raised to 500 MB. And whether you can grasp it or not, 500 MB is not a lot of space in a large organization. In my experience, the single worst culprit is PowerPoint. Big orgs love their PowerPoint presentations, and they are horribly space inefficient. I swear Microsoft developed the format in conjunction with drive makers, to help them sell capacity.

Then you have images. I don't know how much the IRS relies on scanned documents, but they chew up a lot of space. Why? Because again in my experience, imaging systems default to TIFF files, and they are huge, easily ten times bigger than equivalent JPEGs. If they record phone calls, the audio files are large, too.

You also have long MS Word documents. Legal documents tend to be dozens of pages or more, and they add up fast. Throw in a few embedded charts and they balloon. To offer just one real world example, one of my staff prepared a Word report with a lot of embedded performance and capacity charts. It was only about 30 pages, but it was over 50 MB ... per copy.

In short, although I have no knowledge of what sorts of attachments one finds on IRS internal email, it's not hard to see how one can quickly hit that 150 MB or 500 MB limit.

Finally, you still have no idea how much of this email Lerner did print. It is possible she was diligent about it, especially since she undoubtedly had a secretary or two to help. I've worked for executives that never touched a keyboard, and had their secretaries print everything for them. It happens. It remains to be seen how Lerner handled it.

So once you actually get all the facts straight (i.e., ignore the dishonest propaganda from Issa, Fox, etc.), the story isn't quite so absurd. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be investigated and verified, but in my book, it means withholding judgment until the facts are in. The Sonasoft non-story is just the latest example of how the nutter media take non-events and pervert them into MOAR SCANDAL!!!!!

 

[Bowfinger]

At my last four jobs over the last 14 years all email was on the server with potential for local working copy and archives... Be it a Domino mail server or Exchange.

We had our own server archives/backups and pretty much every email that came in was archived. If an employee deleted an email it was still there for posterity just in case HR needed it to terminate them, or in the later years in case we had to dig back years to accommodate a legal investigation/audit. Point is, that is nothing new at all.

Your point about the drives is correct. However the IRS statement that they sent it to HP and to their own IRS Criminal unit for forensic recovery and couldn't retrieve anything is bunk to me. They claim every sector on the drive was bad. The likelihood of that happening where every sector on the drive is bad and data could not be recovered is pretty rare.

EDIT: I just saw the statement from that archiver that they never had access to archive the IRS mail, but were replicating the mail servers. So I stand somewhat corrected from my statement below. Still makes you wonder why they weren't even compliant with gov't standards.

Coupled with their cancellation of a contract with a data archival company that stored their archived mail and you can see why something smells. I've sold to federal, state and commercial accounts both hardware and software for some of the largest IT companies in the industry... and I still do. You simply do not cancel that sort of service and leave yourself non-compliant. You also do not cancel that service without retaining the data from that vendor or having a net new vendor contract in place. I've seen people let their AV maintenance as well other platforms lapse for a period of time as they had perpetual vs term licenses, but those would be the exceptions and not normal for a critical service that was backing up or archiving data.

/sigh

And this is why it is impossible to lead righties to reality. No matter how many times the facts are presented, they continue to cling to all the old talking points. Nobody cares how you handled email at your company. That's NOT how the IRS handled it. It just isn't, as has been documented a dozen or more times in this thread alone. Also, the IRS never had an email archiving contract. What they had was Sonasoft, and Sonasoft wasn't used for archiving, as my quote from Sonasoft clearly states. All the IRS had for email was regular tape backups, and those tapes were scratched after six months.

 

[Bowfinger]

For those looking for an article with more technical information than the regular media, here's a good write-up from Ars Technica's IT editor:

http://arstechnica.com/information-...hose-lost-irs-emails-unbelievable-not-really/
​

He apparently has a significant amount of experience with federal IT.

 

[ivwshane]

/sigh

And this is why it is impossible to lead righties to reality. No matter how many times the facts are presented, they continue to cling to all the old talking points. Nobody cares how you handled email at your company. That's NOT how the IRS handled it. It just isn't, as has been documented a dozen or more times in this thread alone. Also, the IRS never had an email archiving contract. What they had was Sonasoft, and Sonasoft wasn't used for archiving, as my quote from Sonasoft clearly states. All the IRS had for email was regular tape backups, and those tapes were scratched after six months.

If you haven't noticed, righties are incapable of thinking something is possible unless it happened to them. You see it time and time again, they are against something until it happens to them. Be it gay marriage, rape victims, welfare, etc.

 

[Jaskalas]

At some point you have to finally see this. Ask her to testify, pleads the fifth. Ask her for records, hard drive crashed seven times. Ok, backups should have it. 500MB limit. And in the world of professional emails devoid of pictures and BS, 500MB is still a hell of a lot of emails. Ok, printouts then. Didn't happen. This is increasingly getting harder and harder to explain away as faux scandals.

PFD PDF attachments, 500mb for e-mails littered with those isn't anything.

 

[Matt1970]

You seem to have your facts confused, or your writing is exceptionally sloppy.

First, do you understand that it wasn't Lerner who had seven drive crashes, it was seven different IRS employees who each had one drive crash? Also, so far it's only Lerner's drive that was called unrecoverable. We have no information about recovery attempts on the other six drives.

Second, the IRS limit on mailbox size is well documented. I saw it in one of their official policy manuals, for example, linked earlier in this thread. It may not make sense to you, but it's the reality.

Third, the limit was apparently only 150 MB at the time of Lerner's crash. It was later raised to 500 MB. And whether you can grasp it or not, 500 MB is not a lot of space in a large organization. In my experience, the single worst culprit is PowerPoint. Big orgs love their PowerPoint presentations, and they are horribly space inefficient. I swear Microsoft developed the format in conjunction with drive makers, to help them sell capacity.

Then you have images. I don't know how much the IRS relies on scanned documents, but they chew up a lot of space. Why? Because again in my experience, imaging systems default to TIFF files, and they are huge, easily ten times bigger than equivalent JEPGs. If they record phone calls, the audio files are large, too.

You also have long MS Word documents. Legal documents tend to be dozens of pages or more, and they add up fast. Throw in a few embedded charts and they balloon. To offer just one real world example, one of my staff prepared a Word report with a lot of embedded performance and capacity charts. It was only about 30 pages, but it was over 50 MB ... per copy.

In short, although I have no knowledge of what sorts of attachments one finds on IRS internal email, it's not hard to see how one can quickly hit that 150 MB or 500 MB limit.

Finally, you still have no idea how much of this email Lerner did print. It is possible she was diligent about it, especially since she undoubtedly had a secretary or two to help. I've worked for executives that never touched a keyboard, and had their secretaries print everything for them. It happens. It remains to be seen how Lerner handled it.

So once you actually get all the facts straight (i.e., ignore the dishonest propaganda from Issa, Fox, etc.), the story isn't quite so absurd. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be investigated and verified, but in my book, it means withholding judgment until the facts are in. The Sonasoft non-story is just the latest example of how the nutter media take non-events and pervert them into MOAR SCANDAL!!!!!

Please stop it with the fox. I cut the cord down to a string months ago and even then didn't watch much of anything on Fox when I did have it. And for your info I got my info about the seven hard drives crashing from your post #967. Is the seven hard drive crashes nationwide? The IRS employs some 90,000 people so that would be a good ratio.

 

[Matt1970]

...........
Your point about the drives is correct. However the IRS statement that they sent it to HP and to their own IRS Criminal unit for forensic recovery and couldn't retrieve anything is bunk to me. They claim every sector on the drive was bad. The likelihood of that happening where every sector on the drive is bad and data could not be recovered is pretty rare.

.

It's beyond pretty rare.

 

[Genx87]

I don't remember, though I doubt the IRS falls under SOX jurisdiction. The IRS is required to follow federal "official record" preservation regulations, however, and that's an open question. The IRS policy is that any email that qualifies as an official record must be printed and the paper copy retained (with an exception for email stored in an approved record keeping system, or something like that -- N/A in this case). We don't yet know if Lerner followed this paper procedure properly or not.

I just cant believe this is how they believe records should be retained. The costs to retain email in an archive is cheaper than printing and storing.

/facepalm

 

[WackyDan]

I just cant believe this is how they believe records should be retained. The costs to retain email in an archive is cheaper than printing and storing.

/facepalm

That is an excellent point. How much is the yearly federal budget again?

 

[xBiffx]

http://news.yahoo.com/emails-irs-official-sought-audit-204035386.html

Adds even more validity to the case that Lerner may have used the IRS to target political opponents.

 

[fskimospy]

http://news.yahoo.com/emails-irs-official-sought-audit-204035386.html

Adds even more validity to the case that Lerner used the IRS to target political opponents.

If by "used the IRS to target political opponents" you mean "asked a colleague if an audit should happen because she thought something was illegal and when she was told no decided against doing anything"?

EDIT: It's amazing now that even Lerner's decision NOT to audit Grassley is evidence of her using the IRS to attack people.

 

[xBiffx]

If by "used the IRS to target political opponents" you mean "asked a colleague if an audit should happen because she thought something was illegal and when she was told no decided against doing anything"?

EDIT: It's amazing now that even Lerner's decision NOT to audit Grassley is evidence of her using the IRS to attack people.

It wasn't her decision NOT to go with the audit. She was told not to go ahead because nothing had happened yet. Grassley hadn't even accepted the invitation. That and that fact that an individual cannot recommend or suggest an audit alone.

But I'm not surprised that you can't see how asking about an audit for someone who was ultra critical of the IRS handles tax-exempt groups immediately following an incorrectly received email might be suspicious. And given all we know so far, this falls right in line with what Lerner has already apologized for doing. Its just more evidence to that fact. But feel free to spin it any way you want.

 

[fskimospy]

It wasn't her decision NOT to go with the audit. She was told not to go ahead because nothing had happened yet. Grassley hadn't even accepted the invitation. That and that fact that an individual cannot recommend or suggest an audit alone.

But I'm not surprised that you can't see how asking about an audit for someone who was ultra critical of the IRS handles tax-exempt groups immediately following an incorrectly received email might be suspicious. And given all we know so far, this falls right in line with what Lerner has already apologized for doing. Its just more evidence to that fact. But feel free to spin it any way you want.

How is it spin? She asked someone else about it and then didn't do anything. That's just the facts.

 

[xBiffx]

How is it spin? She asked someone else about it and then didn't do anything.

Because someone else stepped in and said not to. But even if that didn't happen, it was against IRS policy to initiate an audit just because she want/recommended it. Lerner knew that yet still send the emails.

 

[fskimospy]

Because someone else stepped in and said not to. But even if that didn't happen, it was against IRS policy to initiate an audit just because she want/recommended it. Lerner knew that.

She asked "should we refer?" the person said "no". So now asking a question is doing it until someone else actively stops you?

 

[Brovane]

For those looking for an article with more technical information than the regular media, here's a good write-up from Ars Technica's IT editor:

http://arstechnica.com/information-...hose-lost-irs-emails-unbelievable-not-really/
​

He apparently has a significant amount of experience with federal IT.

Thank you for linking that article. It was a interesting read and certainly explains to me more about what is going on. I did suspect that govt IT is stuck in 1999. I am also not surprised that because of budget cuts govt IT is so far behind.