Unfortunately the IRS has lost up to 2 years of Lois Lerner’s emails. Through some very hard work the IRS has managed to retrieve her internal emails. However, her external emails are now lost. What’s even more unfortunate is that these emails were from the period when she has been accused of targetting Tea Party Groups.
I believe all Govt employees should have to take an IT course of some sort. It would help prevent incidents such as this.
I wasn’t sure where to post this. Mods, please move it if this is not the correct forum.
What I wish more is that the media would consult maybe a single private sector IT professional.
The only way this could have happened is if the IRS actually does not use an email server. I’m not actually sure how this would be possible. No company just has emails on a person’s computer.
Most likely, they are simply lying. If one freakin’ journalist could just consult their OWN IT department, they’d know this and report it.
I’m no right winger but I’ll agree this looks very suspicious. Especially because these emails have been the subject of an investigation for over a year but were reportedly lost back in 2011. You’d think somebody at the IRS would have mentioned their loss before now.
He is correct. Corporate emails are stored on a central Exchange (or in some cases Lotus Notes Domino) server. Individuals can ALSO store emails locally on a computer, but destroying those files or even the entire computer doesn’t take them off the central server.
And typically those servers are backed up. So even if you erase the emails, there is still some old backup somewhere.
As it happened, I spent 6 years in the “collecting email (and other data) off computers” business. “We can’t find the emails for that particular person for the particular dates your are looking for” is Suspicious Behavior 101.
There’s a setting on my Thunderbird Client that says “Leave messages on server” that I don’t have checked…you’re saying that all my messages are still on my hosting company’s servers?
He didn’t say “corporate companies that use exchange servers and have their clients set up in a specific way to leave the emails on the server…” He said “No company just has emails on a person’s computer.” which is undeniably incorrect.
I have no dog in this fight, I don’t even know what’s going on in the case, but if adaher is going to make these arguments he can’t just pull facts out of his ass or make blanket statements and assume that they hold true to every single person, business and government entity in the country.
A company can choose to delete emails from the server and then they are still only in the employee’s .pst or .ost file. But there is no PC to PC transmission of emails, at least not since 1995 or so.
If the IRS finds preserving emails too challenging, perhaps they should use Yahoo mail. I’ve still got emails on their server from 1998.
Or perhaps they could conduct their business on SDMB. I’m sure a private forum can be set up for them. Probably be more secure than what they’ve got now, given how easily confidential taxpayer information seems to leak out of that organization.
A former(?) employee at the IRS. She is under investigation for illegally targetting the tax status of Tea Party groups in the years before the 2012 elections. Lerner has been pleading the 5th in House hearings so far. A day or so ago the IRS said that a computer crash in 2011 had wiped around 18 months of her email records. That her external emails are non recoverable.
I have a question: if this had happened during a republican administration, would this thread now be 10,000- or 50,000-posts strong.
Unbelievable.
That aside, I’m curious to see which democrats up for reelection will join in calling “bullshit” and take the offensive against the IRS and Lerner’s protectors. A smart Dem could try to own the issue, helping himself or herself and taking a an issue away from the Republicans. Hell, all those with a conscience should do it. I’m seriously amazed and saddened that something like this is still viewed as partisan.
I agree that it is a huge scandal that these groups ever got their tax exempt status approved. The statute is clear that these groups must be working exclusively in the public interest, back in the Eisenhower administration the IRS illegally changed the word “exclusively” to “primarily”. None of these groups, left or right, should have tax exempt status.
It is not a scandal that Teabagger groups were targeted because liberal groups were not targeted. The only difference is that not all liberal groups were approved for tax exempt status and that liberal groups didn’t whine like a bunch of babies.
I agree. One reason my OP was kinda nuetral was to see the reaction it would recieve. Im underwhelmed. One thing for sure is that the media reaction has also been fairly muted too. This is one major instance of what at least looks like open corruption. And certain media outlets have been noticeable so far in their lacklustre coverage of this loss of important data.
Is the claim that the e-mails were lost due to a crash on Lerner’s own computer or workstation, or is it that they were lost due to a crash of the IRS’s e-mail servers? If the former, it doesn’t explain why the e-mails couldn’t be recovered from the server. If the latter, it does explain that, but doesn’t explain why the server wasn’t fully restored from backup. Either way, regardless of how much trouble Lerner herself is in, it sounds to me like someone in the IRS’s IT department should be getting some heat.