More missing IRS emails

Interesting that the NSA can pull up any of our emails from the past decade, but a computer crashes at the IRS and all emails are forever lost.

No use gnashing your teeth over it......nothing will be done, no one will answer for it.

Seems to be the way now days.  I wonder if I can claim to have lost all my financial records if I eve get audited?

That's my plan.

So here's the really interesting part (at least to me).

Nobody in any corporate environment after 2000 uses an email system that has your emails "only reside on your computer".  There is no possible way a "computer crash" or "hard drive failure" could lead to a loss of email.

Any corporate and especially government organization that has a mandatory email retention policy has to have a redundant server side email system such as Exchange where all emails reside. These emails are then backed up daily and archived offsite for the mandatory years the retention is required. This is IT systems 101 type stuff and I provide this service to several small and midsized accounting firms. These companies are required by law to retain all of their data for at least 5 years. If they don't it's punishable by 20 years in prison and heavy fines under Sarbanes Oxley specifically so you bet your bacon they do it.
The Federal Government has the same retention policy and I believe it's even more arduous, especially when it comes to email communications.

The emails that were in play with the IRS scandal all were within the last few years. Those emails resided on their enterprise mail environment of the IRS which will be a very large and robust system due to the size of the IRS. This system would be backed up nightly and securely archived offsite. It would be IT malpractice for it to be any other way and virtually every company with 50 or more employees does this today.  If the emails were between the IRS and the White House then the White House also would have a record of the emails that could be recovered.

I don't really need my tinfoil hat on this one because it couldn't be more obvious that the emails were intentionally deleted and the backups destroyed.  For somebody to intentionally and so obviously violate the law sure gives the outward appearance that those emails had some really bad stuff in them that was far more damaging than the penalty for destruction of the data.  This could potentially and quite likely will land some people in jail.  The question is who destroyed them and under whose orders.

Like I said, anyone using email past 2000.  I think the last company that installed Lotus Notes was in the late 90's.   lol, just kidding.

It boils down to the retention policy that the organization is under and if emails are considered an item worth retaining.  For example, under Sarbanes Oxley it requires that all accountants who conduct an audit or review of a public reporting company that they must keep all audit and review workpapers for a period of five years from the end of the fiscal period in which they conduct an audit or review.  It's a Felony Offense if they simply don't have the files.  It doesn't say they have to keep emails, but there's not a single accounting customer of mine whose willing to take the chance.
Therefore they implement their email system so that 100% of email is retained.  Even deleted email is retained and backed up offsite.

You can absolutely set up systems that allow for local copies that aren't sync'd to a server and you can even set up a system that never retains anything on the server.

So, it really boils down to the true requirements of the IRS when it comes to retention of email which would determine weather or not they are supposed to have a system in place to keep them or not.

Here's their actual policy from the website:  http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html

1.10.3.2.3 (07-08-2011)
Emails as Possible Federal Records 

That's a policy that your sys admin can implement.  It's very common to save on disk storage space on the server.

For example, at my last job which had about 45000 employees, we imposed a 10G mailbox limit which only gave you enough room to store about a month or two worth of email.  We then enabled auto archiving in outlook to replicate it locally every month to prevent mailboxes from filling up on the server, similar to your situation.

The big difference is we chose to set it up that way (for costs) and had no legal requirement whatsoever to retain any emails.

Here at my company I have no legal obligation either but we have a ton of storage space available, so we don't limit mailbox sizes.  I started the business in 2009 and have over 150,000 emails dating back to my very first test email.  They're all stored on our exchange server here in the office that gets replicated to another server in our datacenter.  We then have a nightly backup that runs off the datacenter server that stores everything remotely (or in the cloud as they like to say).

I'm just a tiny company with 9 employees without a mandated retention policy, but I could produce any email every sent/received from any employee at my company in the last 5 years.  The IRS is one of the most important government organizations we have and they have a mandated retention policy.  I truly find it hard to believe that they're doing less than my little 9 person company.

Gotta agree with TUWOOD.  First we know they use Outlook (meaning Exchange).  And we know they have a Federally mandated retention policy.  I would bet that if you gave an IT professional like tuwood access, he would find the emails by the end of the day.  And I'd be willing to bet that there are employees at the IRS that could do so.   My first thought is we are asking the wrong people (Exec./Manager) and should really start bringing the employees who actually do the work and understand the IT environment to answer questions.

I'm sorry but thinking that these emails are truly gone is putting your head in the sand.  And if we know that there were emails to the WH and Justice department, let's get the emails from them.  I'm sure they have an IT person with enough clearance, who probably manages the servers in the first place, that could filter out all emails from Lois, and provide them.  But the WH and DOJ are choosing not to provide this information.

Just my $.02

Not the only administration to have missing emails. Not saying it is right, nor am I saying that since past ones did it it is ok that this one is doing it.  Just pointing out this is by far new.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2014/06/18/a-history-of-the-federal-governments-lost-emails/ 

Yeah, there's no question that people on both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of this and even non-government entities.  That's why they create the laws with the teeth to "prevent" it.  Unfortunately, our lawmakers on both sides of the aisle seem to feel they're above the law in most situations.  :-/

The whole digital age is such a unique thing when it comes to "destroying" information.  It used to be that you could just burn a letter or picture and it was just gone.
People don't often realize how far and wide information goes these days, even outside of the whole NSA type snooping.   As an example, when I take a picture on my phone, it puts it on the memory card, it then syncs to my google+ backup, as well as my dropbox account.
My dropbox account then syncs everything to my PC, my iPad, my nexus tablet etc.  My PC syncs to our servers in the office, and our servers in the office are backed up/replicated to our datacenter servers which are then backed up to our offsite cloud backup.

I'm a pretty smart techie guy and it would be really difficult for me to truly delete a simple picture I took that couldn't be forensically recovered from somewhere.  This is just one simple example which systems that I control.  However, when you throw in whatever backend mechanisms that track/log the information into the mix it gets even deeper.

So, the moral of the story, if I take a picture that I shouldn't be taking it's quite difficult to delete it everywhere.  lol

Same thing for government/corporate entities that send emails they shouldn't be sending.  It's really difficult to truly delete them everywhere.  

Total hypothetical, but that would be the most ironic thing ever if the NSA retrieved embarrassing/incriminating emails to take down some big government dudes.  I might even have to change my opinion slightly on the NSA program.  lol

Lost your faith in what?

It doesn't work any differently now than it ever did.......but nothing goes unnoticed or uncovered anymore.  If you want to see political corruption at it's best go back to the heyday of unions.

I know that every generation thinks the ones behind are screwed up and ruining America, and blah,blah,blah.....but yours, Josh, is probably one of the first who sees the current situation as so screwed up.  It's information overload.  The world is changing, but America's place in the world hasn't changed much, and neither has our form of govt.  50 years ago it was communism, now it's radical muslims.  Do you think the folks during the depression had any faith in our govt., our banks? 

The more things change the more they stay the same.  You can be full of doom and gloom, you can lose faith in everything around you, or you can chose to make the most/best of your life and enjoy all it has to offer.

I have faith in people.....the rest is just noise.

So now we find out there ARE backups of the emails.  And they fired the backup company right after the first HD "crash" (liberal use of quotes).

http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/06/bombshell-irs-fired-back-company-sonasoft-shortly-lois-lerners-computer-crashed/

I wonder if Sonasoft kept copies or not?  I hope Congress is firing off a subpoena as we speak.

And where is the President on this?  Why no pressure to get o the bottom of a obviously a)corrupt or b)inept organization?

Interesting development for sure.

From an outsourcing standpoint, when we have a customer who no longer retains our backup services we will destroy their backup data and often have to provide a certificate of destruction so they have proof that we no longer have any of their "potentially sensitive" customer data.

We would never retain backup data for a customer who is no longer paying for our services, simply because it takes up a lot of space and costs me money to keep it.    The backup outsourcer is also under no obligation to retain anything because that falls upon the company/entity itself.

Typically the way it works is the company simply transfers their old backups to their new provider because they still have the same legal retention requirement.  It really doesn't matter how or with whom they store they data, they just have to retain it.