Well, i did bother to read the above "article" (in my view it is far more worthy of being called 'recycled damaged file'), but the main part of the story is the ongoing Congress investigation on the IRS scandal of targeting anti-Obama political groups. The same story which a while ago saw the former head of that servive quit her job, and then take the 5th (invoking her right to not be forced to testify something which may incriminate her) after first announcing to Congress that she is utterly innocent - but would not want to say stuff which may incriminate her cause then she won't be innocent ).
Anyway, some bit from the article:
the fictitious times said:
n a different age, a man called a liar to his face as many times as John Koskinen was on Friday would have been demanding pistols at dawn. But in our ostensibly more civilized era, the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service sat in the witness chair in a hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee Friday and let the abuse spewing from theatrically angry lawmakers wash over him.
Ever since it was revealed that the agency had wrongly targeted conservative groups, House Republicans have been pursuing every possible lead that might connect the scandal to the White House. So far they have met with no success, but when it was revealed last week that Lerners hard drive had crashed in 2011, destroying an untold number of emails from 2009 to 2011, the conspiracy theorists sensed that they were getting traction. When Koskinen revealed Friday that Lerners hard drive was recycled after the IRSs respected Criminal Investigation Divisions computer forensics lab determined it was beyond salvaging they shifted into overdrive.
If the above is to be termed 'conspiracy theory', then what term should be used for claims that Reptilians are on earth, or that Obama is merely inept?
But i mostly liked this part from the article:
the fiscal times said:
Koskinen also spent considerable time knocking down assertions by Republicans that emails from other key figures in the case had been lost due to computer crashes. The IRS informed Congress on Monday that six other computers belonging to employees that are part of the investigation had suffered crashes. Republicans immediately reported that the IRS was reporting that their emails were all lost as well.
Rep. Camp and Oversight Subcommittee chair Charles Boustany, Jr., (R-LA) put out a press release claiming that emails from all six had been lost. A spokesperson for the Ways and Means committee told The Fiscal Times, their computers crashed and were deemed unrecoverable. The IRS did not respond to multiple requests for clarification on the status of the hard drives.
Koskinen corrected the record in his testimony Friday. While there were crashes, he said, technicians had been able to recover all of the data from some of the computers, and with time might be able to salvage the files from all of them.
So the IRS cannot even afford a tech-savy person who would find the emails without destroying the data? If only there was some government agency that kept emails from people, that would be so much help now.
The hard drives had been sent to Benghazi for storage and were destroyed during the terrorist attack. The Republicans are getting close to the truth, They should have Obama tossed out of office as early as late January 2017.
Lois Lerner should be arrested by the House of Representatives and confined until she testifies in full about the Internal Revenue Service scandal. That is the only viable way to enforce the contempt of Congress approved in early May.
Anybody who believes the IRS cover story about lost emails should know how improbable it is: Its more likely that you could win every Powerball jackpot ever awarded than that computer crashes caused the loss of all the subpoenaed emails connected to the IRS scandal.
Thats why its overdue for the House to get serious.
Despite assurances to the contrary, the IRS didnt destroy all of the donor lists scooped up in its tea party targeting and a check of those lists reveals that the tax agency audited 10 percent of those donors, much higher than the audit rate for average Americans, House Republicans revealed Wednesday.
Republicans argue that the Internal Revenue Service still hasnt come clean about the full extent of its targeting, which swept up dozens of conservative groups.
The committee uncovered new information indicating that after groups provided the information to the IRS, nearly one in 10 donors were subject to audit, Rep. Charles W. Boustany Jr., Louisiana Republican and chairman of the Ways and Means Committees oversight panel, told IRS Commissioner John Koskinen at a hearing Wednesday.
The Internal Revenue Service has seen its budget cut several times over the last few yearsunder new legislation passed by the House Appropriations subcommittee on financial services June 17, the IRS budget would be slashed to its lowest levels in more than five years.
The bill would downsize the IRS budget by $341 millionabout $1.5 billion less than President Barack Obamas requestto approximately $11 billion for the 2015 fiscal year.
It should be obvious to every member of Congress that slashing the budget and reducing staffing at the agency is not only counterproductiveit is a danger to the effective functioning of our voluntary tax compliance system.
The subcommittee said in a statement after the bills passing that the funding level is sufficient enough for the IRS to perform core duties, but requires the agency to make efficient and better use of the budget.
The agency has a history of using funds to produce inappropriate videos and conferences, spending $4.1 million on a 2010 conference in California and at least $50,000 to produce a Star Trek parody video.
Millions of individual taxpayers and businesses will bear the brunt of the severe impacts of these cuts for an agency which already has lost 10,000 employees from reduced funding over the past four years, said Kelley.
The support deadline for Windows XP has come and gone, and to no one's surprise, there are still many organizations using the obsolete platform. The British and Dutch governments are paying Microsoft for extended support, and joining them is the Internal Revenue Service.
The House Financial Services and General Government subcommittee heard last week that the agency's Windows XP to Windows 7 migration was still ongoing, with about 58,000 machines (of a total of 110,000) still on the unsupported operating system. The agency is trying to find $30 million to finish the upgrade.
Until the replacement is complete, the agency is paying Microsoft for its expensive extended support, but there are quibbles over how much is being paid. Computerworld initially calculated that it would be around $11 million, a little more than the $9.2 million that the British government is paying. The IRS, however, says that the sum is much lowerless than $500,000, with the exact figure to be published at some later date.
The IRS also makes clear that its failure to hit Microsoft's deadline doesn't mean that taxpayers will have any excuse for missing its April 15 deadline.
The agency intends to have the update work complete by the end of 2014. Six years later, it will have to happen all over again, when Windows 7's extended support ends in 2020
A budget of $11 billion, and they can't find $30 million to upgrade to Windows 7?
And they couldn't do this last year and avoid paying for expensive extended support?
Lost hard drive with no backup in defiance of record keeping laws seems more and more possible.
Will Obama's NSA mysteriously stonewall Congress too like the IRS?
We know the DOJ won't prosecute Lois Lerner.
Eric Holder declined to prosecute himself for Contempt of Congress a few years back himself and he runs the place.
Hopefully all kinds on unaccountable bureaucracies get the hell cut out of their budgets until they start answering Congress' questions, doing their duties, and get their priorities straight.
After this brutal tirade, the IRS commissioner said he wouldn't apologize to Congress for losing the e-mails.
And that appointing a special investigator would be a huge waste of taxpayer money to get to the bottom of the IRS.
The IRS doesn't like it when they are the ones being audited!!!
Its the IRS business to be in our businessso Ryan is giving them the business. Its hard to think of a federal agency that is less forgiving about record keeping. If you are audited, the IRS wants you to move fast. Not only do you have to keep your records for years, as Ryan says, but the IRS wants you to move quick like a bunny. And the entire process has one subliminal message to it: I dont believe you.
Paul Ryan emptied his anger over IRS Commissioner John Koskinen like he was flushing a radiator.
That is exactly what Ryan said to the IRS commissioner, who took umbrage. Now he knows how it feels. Its not Commissioner Koskinen who lost the emails, hes just on the wrong side of a bad policy that doesnt require the IRS to be as records-conscious as the citizens it polices. But in the traditional IRS power relationship, its usually the subjects of its audits who feel the unfocused and overly harsh attention of a system that assumes they are guilty.
One of the big complaints I hear from voters, particularly conservative voters, is that the government exempts itself from the burdens it puts on everyday people. So members of Congress are treated differently under the Affordable Care Act than regular citizens, President Obama can decide which laws he wants to follow and which ones he doesnt, and the IRS doesnt have to be as circumspect as the rest of us. Sometimes there are good explanations, like the congressional exemption from the ACA, but since the IRS is stingy with its benefit-of-the-doubt powers, it has a high bar with the public.
Franklin D. Roosevelt: According to libertarian historian Burton W. Folsom's New Deal or Raw Deal, Elliott Roosevelt, the president's son, noted that FDR "may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution"—most notably against former Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long. (The famously corrupt Long, in fairness, was kind of asking for it.) Rep. Hamilton Fish, a New York Republican, alleged that Roosevelt's IRS had gone after him on trumped-up charges—and when that failed, handed the investigation over to the FBI instead. Roosevelt's longtime Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., admitted that the administration had deliberately targeted his Republican predecessor, Richard Mellon, on trumped-up charges of tax evasion.
Dwight Eisenhower: The FBI's counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, relied heavily on the compliance of the IRS to go after members of the Communist Party. Per a 1976 Senate report, "In its efforts against the Communist Party, the FBI had unlimited access to tax returns; it never told the IRS why it wanted them, and IRS never attempted to find out."
John F. Kennedy: In 1961, Attorney General Robert Kennedy teamed up with United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther to produce the "Reuther Memorandum," which proposed curtailing the influence of far-right groups in two ways. The first was the enforcement of the Federal Communication Commision's "Fairness Doctrine," to limit their use of the airwaves. The second was the IRS, through an initiative called "The Ideological Organizations Audit Project," which explored the political activities of conservative nonprofits. The program eventually expanded to the other of the side of political spectrum, but according to the 1976 Senate investigation, that was mostly a facade of nonpartisanship.
Richard Nixon: The godfather of "Nixonian tactics" believed he'd been a political target of the agency in the Truman administration—not that he needed an excuse to use the Internal Revenue Service as a tool with which to dispatch "enemies." Under Tricky Dick, the IRS created the Special Services Staff (SSS) to investigate thousands of perceived enemy groups and individuals. (Nixon aide Pat Buchanan feared that groups like the Ford Foundation and Brookings Institution were acting essentially as Democratic organs.) White House counsel John Dean testified that the administration pushed the IRS to audit reporters who wrote stories critical of Nixon, such as Newsday's Robert Greene. Nixon himself wanted the SSS to focus on political adversaries like 1972 presidential challenger George McGovern, student groups, and civil rights organizations like the NAACP. When the IRS audited Billy Graham, a Nixon ally, the president responded with force: "Get the word down to the IRS that I want them to conduct field audits of those who are our opponents, if they're going to do in our friends."
Ronald Reagan: This one hit close to home. Mother Jones had been around for six years when, in 1981, Ronald Reagan's IRS tried to shut it down. The agency concluded that the magazine was not living up to its tax-exempt motives and instead functioned like any other publishing house, with the goal of making as much money as possible. That was weird, given that Mother Jones had to that point never made a profit. The timing was also suspicious—a half-dozen or so other left-of-center publications came in for the same scrutiny by the agency. MoJo eventually won—but not until it had burned hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.
To be perfectly fair - while facing one of these Congressional fishing expeditions - to claim protection under the 5th Amendment is the lesser of two evils. Even if IRS officials are innocent of the direct charges, the inquisition will just keep digging around until it finds something it can use. The mere appearance of wrongdoing anywhere in the bureaucracy is enough to damn the official in the Press and in the court of public opinion; as well as to get the Congressmen plenty of free air time for his reelection campaign.
Formy's examples of the IRS being used as a weapon by the Whitehouse, while interesting, yet raises the question as to whether the IRS is it's own entity - does it decide to go after someone - or is it always just the tool of the President?
Meanwhile, there are literally tens of thousands of political organizations which continue to misuse their non-profit status. For a very brief period, the IRS actually tried to do something about them.
Tea party groups are "social welfare" organizations now ?
Who knew that republicans are for social welfare.
They were seeking approval to operate under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. This would require them to be social welfare, not political, operations
I've been in charge of various IT departments for small and medium-sized businesses over the years, and my duties included responsibility for the mail server(s). I have quite a bit of trouble comprehending how an IT support organization could allow such a loss of data. Aside from anything else, there are logs on the mail server which should be preserved which should show a time/date and to/from for every email going in or out of every mailbox hosted on it.
I'll skip the joke about asking the NSA for a copy of the emails...
I've been in charge of various IT departments for small and medium-sized businesses over the years, and my duties included responsibility for the mail server(s). I have quite a bit of trouble comprehending how an IT support organization could allow such a loss of data. Aside from anything else, there are logs on the mail server which should be preserved which should show a time/date and to/from for every email going in or out of every mailbox hosted on it.
I'll skip the joke about asking the NSA for a copy of the emails...
I agree, at best it's mind-blowing incompetence and I'm really getting tired of sitting through a presidency where gross incompetence is a daily occurrence(though I have a feel I may experience this the rest of my life but that's an entire other rant).
Is there any word on the exact nature of all these harddrive failures? My understanding is they sent Lerner's HD back to HP and HP they said they couldn't recover it. Okay, that's fine, but I personally have had instances where the manufacturer said they couldn't recover anything but a third party was able to do so. Then the IRS' forensics lab couldn't recover anything; normally I would be okay with that, but if the question is "was there a cover-up here?", a branch of the IRS determining it couldn't be recovered doesn't count for as much as it normally would.
I'm also a little confused about the timeline of when they were subpoenaed for the hard drives and when they were destroyed and why they didn't think this was an important thing to mention at testimony if, indeed, they had been destroyed prior to the IRS director's testimony.
During this time period (2009-2011), the IRS capped how much material each employee could keep in an email account to about 1,800 emails. If the employee went above that capacity, the individual had to either delete emails or move them to their hard drive. All of them on Lerner's hard drive were lost when it crashed.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed.
The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” Sonasoft in 2009 tweeted, “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”
Sonasoft was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.
But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right.
Sonasoft’s fiscal year 2011 contract with the IRS ended on August 31, 2011. Eight days later, the IRS officially closed out its relationship with Sonasoft in accordance with the federal government’s contract close-out guidelines, which require agencies to fully audit their contracts and to get back any money that wasn’t used by the contractor. Curiously, the IRS de-allocated 36 cents when it closed out its contract with Sonasoft on September 8, 2011.
Lois Lerner’s computer allegedly crashed in June 2011, just ten days after House Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Dave Camp first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was engaging in targeting of nonprofit groups. Two months later, Sonasoft’s contract ended and the IRS gave its email-archiving contractor the boot.
IRS official and frequent White House visitor Nikole Flax allegedly suffered her own computer crash in December 2011, three months after the IRS ended its relationship with Sonasoft.
The IRS is spinning a tale of bureaucratic incompetence to explain the vanishing emails from former Tax Exempt Organizations doyenne Lois Lerner and six other IRS employees. We have less faith by the minute that there is an innocent explanation for this failure to cooperate with Congress, but even if true it doesn't matter. The IRS was under a legal obligation to retain the information because of a litigation hold.
In 2009 a pro-Israel group called Z Street applied to the IRS for tax-exempt status. When the process was delayed, an IRS agent told the group that its application was undergoing special review because "these cases are being sent to a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization's activities contradict the Administration's public policies." In August 2010 Z Street sued the IRS on grounds that this selective processing of its application amounted to viewpoint discrimination.
Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and legal precedent, once the suit was filed the IRS was required to preserve all evidence relevant to the viewpoint-discrimination charge. That means that no matter what dog ate Lois Lerner's hard drive or what the IRS habit was of recycling the tapes used to back up its email records of taxpayer information, it had a legal duty not to destroy the evidence in ongoing litigation.
In private white-collar cases, companies facing a lawsuit routinely operate under what is known as a "litigation hold," instructing employees to affirmatively retain all documents related to the potential litigation. A failure to do that and any resulting document loss amounts to what is called "willful spoliation," or deliberate destruction of evidence if any of the destroyed documents were potentially relevant to the litigation.
At the IRS, that requirement applied to all correspondence regarding Z Street, as well as to information related to the vetting of conservative groups whose applications for tax-exempt status were delayed during an election season. Instead, and incredibly, the IRS cancelled its contract with email-archiving firm Sonasoft shortly after Ms. Lerner's computer "crash" in June 2011.
As far as I can tell, the agency is using exchange servers with Microsoft Outlook e-mail clients. In a system like this, messages are normally stored on the server. However, the IRS sharply limits the size of mailboxes. In 2009, the limit was 150 megabytes; by 2011, it had increased that to 500 MB. Either way, this is a low limit, in these days of sizable attachments. This would require anyone but the proverbial Web-browsing grandmother to regularly archive their e-mails on a hard drive or delete them.
According to documents provided by the IRS, Lerner was archiving her e-mails on her local hard drive, which developed fatal problems (bad sectors) in the middle of June 2011. The data proved unrecoverable despite heroic efforts on the part of the IT staff. They can partially reconstruct her mailbox by searching the archives of other IRS employees but cannot retrieve any e-mails to or from outside users, because the server's backup tapes have been recycled, and the hard drive is gone.
Is this plausible? Unfortunately, yes. I have worked for organizations that used these sorts of restrictions on hard drive space.
However, it’s also moronic IT policy. Hard drive space has been dirt cheap for more than a decade. The IRS's policies on e-mail storage were primitive even by the standards of 15 years ago, when I was working as a technology consultant. At that time, it was bog standard policy at every office I worked at, including small businesses, to regularly pull a set of backup tapes out of rotation -- once a week at financial firms, once a month at smaller businesses with less regulatory overhead, once every three months for the truly cash-strapped -- and stash it in a vault in case you needed to recover something later. It should not have been possible for the IRS to lose more than a few days -- at most a few weeks -- of Lois Lerner’s e-mail. Unfortunately, the IRS only started storing its backup tapes last year, long after the scandal broke.
Such policies indicate either an agency that is not concerned with preserving good audit chains or one that has an extremely penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to IT policy. At prevailing wages -- and hard drive prices -- it is a waste of money to force even your lowest-level employee to spend time painstakingly deleting or archiving e-mails. If IRS staffers don’t have anything better to do with their time, then the IRS needs fewer staffers, not stricter mailbox policies.
In the case of a government agency, however, it’s especially troubling. Records pertaining to agency decisions are supposed to be systematically archived forever.
Moving heaven and earth to recover all in the in-house Lois Lerner emails for 2009 to 2011 is good work.
Only have to check every mailbox on the server and manually check every employees pc who archived their own emails for any that said From: Lois Lerner. (This took 100,000 hours probably )
But the IRS can't get the ones she sent outside the IRS. (To/From White House and others)
So I guess the Republicans can go ask Obama if he got any emails from her?
This last little bit is what is really going to get the IRS in hot water.
The Republicans reallllllly want a smoking gun and it theoretically exists right where these missing emails are.
Nixon had some accidentally erased records too.
Earlier this week, Ways and Means Republicans said as many as six IRS employees involved in the scandal also lost email in computer crashes, including the former chief of staff for the acting IRS commissioner.
That’s because before May 2013, the IRS backed up emails only for six months on a tape, then recycled the tapes, so they essentially threw out the data. Many agencies do the same, transparency experts say.
ALL email backup copies are destroyed after a few months? What on earth for?
To write over them and save money?
I bet the IRS having spent $10 million trying to get the Lerner emails back have rethought this policy.
So she had 500MB mailbox on email server. Copies were archived for 6 months and then destroyed.
She filled up her mailbox on ??? and moved old 2009 to 2011 emails onto her work computer to make room for new emails.
Her PC crashed and the emails are gone forever because there are no backups.
A bunch of other employees involved in the Tea Party Targeting investigation also did this and their computers crashed too...
^They probably just want to save a few cents on data storage, to help with the economy. No good deed goes unpunished though.
Thankfully there is still a happy ending, cause a government employee can take the 5th without any problem when the government is the most transparent ever JesObama and pals
My comment was relevant to the fact that everytime people work themselves into a lather over some new Obama controversy directed by the GOP, it is a bunch of crap. More than that, it is often horribly misleading if not downright factually incorrect and slanderous. Are we supposed to ignore the fact that this is a recurring theme?
Seeing the news sources linked in the OP, Katzilla isn't even trying. You can't link the Blaze and not get away with at least one post pointing all this out.
This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
).
So the IRS cannot even afford a tech-savy person who would find the emails without destroying the data? If only there was some government agency that kept emails from people, that would be so much help now.
![[offtopic]](/images/smilies/offtopic.gif "Offtopic [offtopic]")
