The Out-Of-Control IRS

[Shady]

The Internal Revenue Service is suppose to be non-partisan. It should be, and be seen as, an impartial auditor of tax and revenue policy. It should not be used as a political tool. It's failed miserably on all counts.

IRS to Congress: We lost 2 years worth of emails.

In a press statement on Friday afternoon, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) revealed that the Internal Revenue Service has informed Congress that lost more than two years worth of emails involving recently-resigned official Lois Lerner, who found herself at the center of the 2013 controversy surrounding tax-exempt status of politically conservative groups.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/irs-to-congress-we-lost-two-years-of-emails-involving-lois-lerner/

So wouldn't you know, 10 days after receving a letter from Congress, requesting said emails related to their targeting of conservative political organizations, the darndest thing happend. The former IRS commissioner, and several others, who's emails were also requested, had their hard drives crash. Don't you hate it when that happens? And what did the IRS do with said hard drives? They had them recycled!

What a coinkydink!

Now new documents show that the former IRS commissioner also sought the audit of top Republican senators...

IRS official sought audit of GOP senator

Congressional investigators say they uncovered emails Wednesday showing that a former Internal Revenue Service official at the heart of the tea party investigation sought an audit involving a Republican senator in 2012.

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

And if all of this wasn't bad enough...

IRS agrees to pay non-profit group $50,000 for unauthorized release of tax return

The Internal Revenue Service has agreed to pay the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) $50,000 as part of a settlement of NOM’s suit against the IRS for the unauthorized release of NOM’s tax return

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/06/24/irs-agrees-to-pay-non-profit-group-50000-for-unauthorized-release-of-tax-return/

What in the world is the IRS doing releasing tax returns for? One can disagree with the political message of this traditional marriage group, but why in the world would the IRS be leaking that kind of information? It's completely outrageous, and people need to go to jail for this kind of politicizing fo what's suppose to be an impartial arbitor of the law.

Btw, lets also not forget that the former IRS commissioner, Ms. Lois Lerner pleaded the 5th when asked to testify in front of congress. If anyone is unfamiliar with the 5th, it's what somebody does when their testimony could implicate them in crminal wrongdoing.

Now, why would somebody plead the 5th amendment if nothing criminal was going on? The answer should be pretty obvious.

More to come...

[Shady]

Jon Stewart had a great take on it last night...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQwe97JmAwQ

You know it's bad when you've lost Jon Stewart.

[jbg]

In law we call that spoliation of evidence. The presumption is that the information that was destroyed would have been harmful to the destroyer.

[Bonam]

It's fairly obvious that the IRS purposefully destroyed data in a badly botched attempt to cover things up. Not sure why other than total stupidity... the fallout from the cover-up is almost always far worse than the fallout from the what was covered up.

[GostHacked]

All their reasons for losing the emails are complete bogus. This was deliberate destruction.

1 - deleted emails can be recovered.

2 - most email environments still store delivered email on the server side.

3 - metadata can show when emails were delivered and received.

I started reading about this last week, and any IT tech with minimal email experience knows that the reasons they gave are ... to use Shady's term, absolute nonsense.

[jbg]

It's fairly obvious that the IRS purposefully destroyed data in a badly botched attempt to cover things up. Not sure why other than total stupidity... the fallout from the cover-up is almost always far worse than the fallout from the what was covered up.

Same issue as Watergate; if the IRS fandango came out immediately it may have queered what was already a close election for Obama. Obama, just like Nixon, found it better to kick the mess down the road.

[Bonam]

All their reasons for losing the emails are complete bogus. This was deliberate destruction.

1 - deleted emails can be recovered.

2 - most email environments still store delivered email on the server side.

3 - metadata can show when emails were delivered and received.

I started reading about this last week, and any IT tech with minimal email experience knows that the reasons they gave are ... to use Shady's term, absolute nonsense.

Indeed. The failed hard drives are similarly farcical.

[Michael Hardner]

Jon Stewart had a great take on it last night...

I think he's finally putting the obvious and non-partisan problems with government out there for all of us to see.

And these things are happening in Canada too. The bureaucracy needs to be cut loose from the political side more, and allowed to succeed or fail without politicians watching every move. It makes them too slow and expensive, and they fail anyway.

[Argus]

It sounds to me like none of you have ever worked for a large institution. Hard drives do break, and generally, data is not saved beyond six months. I can tell you from when I worked for CRA there were often computer problems, and backup often didn't work, especially with regard to laptops which had high security software installed.

Edited June 26, 2014 by Argus

[Argus]

So wouldn't you know, 10 days after receving a letter from Congress, requesting said emails related to their targeting of conservative political organizations, the darndest thing happend. The former IRS commissioner, and several others, who's emails were also requested, had their hard drives crash.

Your cite says nothing about multiple hard drive crashes. It said that Lois Lerners hard drive crashed, that's all. But regardless, this congress has been so completey unproductive in terms of actually passing legislation, that they've kept themselves busy by simply suppoening everyone in sight. When they get the information they want, they find nothing interesting. Whenever someone can't produce the information they raise a huge ruckus as if there's a grand conspiracy.

Edited June 26, 2014 by Argus

[guyser]

Hard drives at the bottom of the ocean can be salvaged.

Something just aint right about this.

[Bonam]

It sounds to me like none of you have ever worked for a large institution. Hard drives do break, and generally, data is not saved beyond six months. I can tell you from when I worked for CRA there were often computer problems, and backup often didn't work, especially with regard to laptops which had high security software installed.

Emails are stored in multiple different places as a matter of internet architecture, and the vast majority of hard drive failures are related to motor/head failures or corruptions of one sector of data while leaving all the remaining data easily readable. Having all the hard drives break in that short span of time right after the investigation starts is a blatant bald-faced lie, completely beyond the bounds of any statistical plausibility.

Edited June 26, 2014 by Bonam

[Bob Macadoo]

Emails are stored in multiple different places as a matter of internet architecture, and the vast majority of hard drive failures are related to motor/head failures or corruptions of one sector of data while leaving all the remaining data easily readable. Having all the hard drives break in that short span of time right after the investigation starts is a blatant bald-faced lie, completely beyond the bounds of any statistical plausibility.

Not that I don't think this is fishy but you would be surprised at the arbitrary rules of some workplaces. At my work you are allowed 2GB of e-mail. It made me discard highly relevant e-mails I wish I had today. The article said her harddrive, the only one I think was under subpoena, was broken. Yes it might be forensically recovered but do you keep your drives around for that, I don't. IT takes my tower, and sends it to China "for recycling". Lastly for some reason public entities I have dealt with have very small administrative server space. Probably b/c they don't think like a business, just a bureaucracy with a defined budget.

Edited June 26, 2014 by Bob Macadoo

[dre]

Emails are stored in multiple different places as a matter of internet architecture

Not really. Most organizations use exchange or lotus notes and whether you want the server to store mail or not is an option. And data on the sending and recieving clients can be lost or arbitrarily deleted.

Anyways this just goes to show that not only are governments inherently dishonest but they are also really bad at IT, and have very poor command of their data.

[Bonam]

Not that I don't think this is fishy but you would be surprised at the arbitrary rules of some workplaces. At my work you are allowed 2GB of e-mail. It made me discard highly relevant e-mails I wish I had today. The article said her harddrive, the only one I think was under subpoena, was broken. Yes it might be forensically recovered but do you keep your drives around for that, I don't. IT takes my tower, and sends it to China "for recycling". Lastly for some reason public entities I have dealt with have very small administrative server space. Probably b/c they don't think like a business, just a bureaucracy with a defined budget.

There were apparently 7 hard drives in question that all mysteriously "failed". The odds of 7 separate specific hard drives to fail in a given year have been estimated as one in several billion (each one has a few % chance to fail in a given year).

[Bob Macadoo]

There were apparently 7 hard drives in question that all mysteriously "failed". The odds of 7 separate specific hard drives to fail in a given year have been estimated as one in several billion (each one has a few % chance to fail in a given year).

Where did that probability come from? My work group has had multiple drive failures in a year.

[Bonam]

Where did that probability come from? My work group has had multiple drive failures in a year.

Yes there are billions of hard drives out there so clearly millions fail every year. But the odds for the 7 specific drives of interest to ALL have failed is the multiple of the probabilities of each individual specific one failing, each of which is a few %.

[bush_cheney2004]

Even if the desktop hard drives had failed in such an unlikely manner, data can still be retrieved at the sector level. E-mail server side storage is far more reliable and redundant. Nixon's secretary Rose Mary Woods (Watergate tapes) had a better story than these clowns.

[Argus]

Emails are stored in multiple different places as a matter of internet architecture, and the vast majority of hard drive failures are related to motor/head failures or corruptions of one sector of data while leaving all the remaining data easily readable. Having all the hard drives break in that short span of time right after the investigation starts is a blatant bald-faced lie, completely beyond the bounds of any statistical plausibility.

"All the hard drives fail"? We're talking about one or two. And yes, you might well be able to gather most of the data if you really work at it. But that's not what institutions do. When it's dead, they chuck it out. End of story. This was a couple of years back and they had no reason to believe someone would eventually want that data.

[Argus]

Not really. Most organizations use exchange or lotus notes and whether you want the server to store mail or not is an option. And data on the sending and recieving clients can be lost or arbitrarily deleted.

We were always deleting emails at CRA. First, because nobody told us not to. Second, because as BM has said, we were restricted to a small amount, I think ours was actually only 1 gig. Once, I lost all my emais because it turned out the IT tech who had set up my computer had set them to record onto my hard drive instead of the server, and when my computer died, that was that. Could they, making a big effrt, have gotten them from the server? Probably, but they didn't bother.

And that's without the number of server issues we had. They were ALWAYS overloaded and we were ALWAYS getting warnings to delete stuff because they needed space.

[Argus]

There were apparently 7 hard drives in question that all mysteriously "failed". The odds of 7 separate specific hard drives to fail in a given year have been estimated as one in several billion (each one has a few % chance to fail in a given year).

was it 7 hard drives out of 7 requested or 7 hard drives out of 7000 requested?

[Bob Macadoo]

Yes there are billions of hard drives out there so clearly millions fail every year. But the odds for the 7 specific drives of interest to ALL have failed is the multiple of the probabilities of each individual specific one failing, each of which is a few %.

I have to disagree. If a work group's computers started service at the same time, see similar loading one would/should expect they would have similar MTBF and fail together. Random sampling failure probabilities kinda don't apply.

[bush_cheney2004]

E-mails and files have long been considered evidence for the electronic discovery process (criminal or civil investigation). Any effort to destroy or corrupt such data after the process has started is considered to be obstruction and tampering. If normal retention and disposal procedures were being followed for documents and electronic data....fine....but purposeful obstruction outside of that looks very bad.

[Shady]

Uh oh! More problems for the IRS, the government agency that feels it's above the law, and above everybody else.

I can only imagine if this was some corporation in question, instead of the IRS. I'm sure Argus, and others would be offering similar excuses and defences of said corporation.

[Argus]

Uh oh! More problems for the IRS, the government agency that feels it's above the law, and above everybody else.

I can only imagine if this was some corporation in question, instead of the IRS. I'm sure Argus, and others would be offering similar excuses and defences of said corporation.

Does it even give you pause that after all the investigations by Republican committees there has yet to be unearthed anything which suggests there were political motives involved in looking into the questionable charitable status of right wing money laundering groups?