At a time when House Republicans are once again voting to cut the IRS’s budget, they’re also attacking the agency for equipment failure that led to unrecoverable email records. On top of that, the IRS has already spent $18 million responding to committee requests related to the so-called investigation. Experts and reporters have chimed in to argue that an equipment failure at the IRS was possible, partly due to outdated equipment. Ranking Member Sander Levin said yesterday that “every equipment failure is not a conspiracy."
WHAT THEY’RE SAYING:
Josh Gerstein and Rachel Bade of Politico: “Transparency advocates and experts in retrieving email from antiquated government computer systems say they’re not at all surprised. The reason: The IRS’s record-keeping procedures - like erasing backup tapes every six months - have been known for years as critical weaknesses in government record collection. These observers say all of the warning signs were there for years before large troves of messages from as many as six IRS employees caught up in the tea party scandal were destroyed through a combination of equipment failures and inadequate archiving procedures." (Politico: Really!? The IRS Lost All those Emails? Actually, It Can Happen )
Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington: “How do you possibly have backup tapes and then not even use them and recycle them after six months? … How typical this is,’ So many people are acting like, ‘Oh, this is an attempt to subvert the truth.’ … But this is a government-wide problem." …. “Sadly, the recent events at the IRS are not an anomaly. Unless Congress amends the [Federal Records Act] to add more vigorous enforcement mechanisms and increased penalties for non-compliance, agency records will continue to be at risk of destruction, and Congress and other oversight bodies will continue to be frustrated in their search for the truth." (Politico: Really!? The IRS Lost All those Emails? Actually, It Can Happen and Tax Analysts: Republicans Seek Lerner Hard Drive, Other Employee E-Mails )
Megan McArdle of Bloomberg: “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." (Bloomberg: Missing E-Mail Is the Least of the IRS's Problems )
Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates: "The idea that this happened doesn't surprise me." (FoxNews.com: IRS email snafu )
