Your forgetting the Congressional elections of that year. Elections in which Tea Party groups were unfairly handicapped. I doubt its coincidence that greater scrutiny was placed on Tea Party groups in the six months or so before the 2010 elections and going on months into Presidential election year. A scandal does not have to change an election. An illegal act only has to take place. For instance, if a Presidential candidate illegaly influences a Presidential election(and im not saying this went to Presidential level) then it matters not if this act changed the election outcome. The attempt or the act only has to take place in order for that candidate to have committed a crime.
An incompetent attempt to address a real concern? That may or may not be an adequate explanation. However, with every missing email, every computer crash and with every missing hard drive the “real concern” angle is looking less and less likely.
Obviously there are only a few real IT folks around here. If one HD fails, OK I can understand that even though it’s HIGHLY suspicious. That is not out of the realm of possibility. But now 6 others are gone. Does this not scream to you that something is amiss? Come on guys and gals, this is stupid and obvious. If one HD craps out, alright I understand. But 6 more are gone that were under investigation?! That takes it from the realm of possibility to the realm of NO FREAKING WAY. Where are the back ups for the email servers? What? There are none? Really? If the IRS came for you or your business, what do you think you would be required to provide?
As my great grandfather would say; “Simple, simple, simple.”
So if a Tea Party (or another such group) does not get its beneficial tax status through in time for an election this does not hurt the group or the individuals within it? I’ll remember that when I start a thread proposing that the Democratic Party should pay a 50% rate tax on its income while setting taxes on Republican Party income at 20%.
There’s a factual answer to the question, and the answer to your question is, no: it does not hurt the group or the individuals within it. Until the IRS rules, YOU ARE ALLOWED TO ACT AS THOUGH YOUR APPLICATION HAS BEEN APPROVED.
For the all-caps reason above, your analogy is inapt.
Sure it costs you something. Keeping track of which drive is which is not free; neither is storage and retrieval. You’re still going to look like you’re concealing something if you produce a broken and unreadable drive, so what advantage do you gain?
(All the subpoenas I’ve ever seen are for information, not a physical device. The other side doesn’t care what physical device it was stored on, so “the broken drive that used to be in XYZ’s computer” is still non-responsive. Failure to produce the emails or the spreadsheets or whatever specific information the other side is after is failure, and if you can’t produce those, you’ve lost credibility, no matter what broken piece of garbage you produce in their place.)
Certainly my employer destroys unreadable drives, and since we have a lot of data and tend to use commodity drives, we have a lot of bad ones, or just ones that have outlived their usefulness. If we stored every drive we’ve ever had, just in case, we’d have far more in storage than in active use. You think that’s free?
You are not talking three separate events. At most companies I’ve ever heard of, bad drives are automatically destroyed (recycled). If the hard drive crashed, regardless of whether anything was subsequently recovered, the hard drive was sent for destruction automatically, because the benefits of keeping it are negligible, and the costs are not. At best, you’ve got two events: the unrecoverable crash, and the records being in only one place. However, if the records are in more than one place, an unrecoverable crash in one location is meaningless, and you’d probably never even hear about it. (Similarly, if the records are only in one place but that place has no errors, you’ll likely never know.) It’s only the two conditions occurring together that makes this an event in the first place.
Commodity hard drives break. That’s a simple fact of IT. Several studies, including that done by Backblaze in 2013, showed that three-year-old drives have better than a one-in-ten chance of crashing; twenty percent of drives don’t last four years.
Now, how frequently is the IRS buying new machines? A three-year replacement cycle is considered pretty good in most businesses.
I thought the issue was something about tax exempt status for organisations working primarily for the “public good”?
Why does it matter about election year or not if they are working for “public good”? If the organisation was “unfairly handicapped” doesn’t that mean they should never have had the tax exempt status in the first place?
Not exactly. 501(c)(4) organizations can do issues advocacy to a much higher degree than 501(c)(3) organizations; they can, for example, suggest that Obamacare is the second coming of Stalinist Russia, or whatever other dumbshit idea they come up with. So if they were actually hamstrung (which they weren’t), that could have an actual effect on the election–no doubt a salubrious one, but not one in accordance with our laws, which is, I suppose, ultimately harmful.
Obviously the courts have decided that such groups are in the public good. Im not a constitutional lawywer. If you have a problem with the decision of the Supreme Court then take it up with them and not a poster on an internet forum. I assume politics is deemed as the public good.
Can these Tea Party groups claim with a straight face that engaging in political activities is not its primary activity? If we want to believe this unfairly handicapped the Tea Party, then we have to admit that they are primarily a political group and not a social welfare group and thus shouldn’t have been a 501(c)(4) group in the first place.
They obviously can, yes. Otherwise we wouldn’t have a situation in which their requests for tax exempt status were eventually granted. You can quote part of the IRS requirements all you wish. The fact is they passed these requirements with flying colours.
Flying colors? Perhaps it came down to “this is a borderline case co to avoid getting taken to court we probably should hold our nose and stamp it approved”.
So every Tea Party group was a borderline case? Perhaps, I can see why the IRS would not be happy about tax exemptions.
As has been said, other groups did not receive such tax exemptions from the IRS. The IRS showed little fear in those other cases. What does seem clear is that these Tea party groups did meet IRS guidelines. You’d think if so many were borderline cases a number of them would have been declined. Through the law of averages a proportion of borderline cases ought to be thrown out. Either the IRS was running scared(not its default status in most of its tax collecting history) or everything the Tea Party groups did was legal and above board.
Yeah, the cognitive dissonance being demonstrated in this thread is frustrating. It seems like it is literally not possible to find an IT professional who thinks the IRS’ explanation is believable. Yet, this thread is full of people who are willing to believe that is pure accident that all of this data just happened to be lost just as a congressional investigation was beginning.
Like I said, it’s looking increasingly likely that someone at the IRS will go to jail over this.
If this is a cover-up, wouldn’t it have to be a rather large conspiracy at this point. I’m not denying the possibility, but who are the players? How many? Are they all democrats?
If it is a conspiracy, it’s going to fall apart quickly. How long before a special prosecutor takes over? Then we can get the important question answered: What did Obama know and when did he know it?
Sorry, I’m an IT professional, and I don’t have any problem whatsoever believing the IRS’s explanation is possible. I’ve seen too many data losses myself, mostly because of decisions made up-front that resulted in single points of failure.
Now if the IRS says that six out of eight hard drives failed with unrecoverable data loss, then I would be squeamish. Since they haven’t said six out of how many, and it is quite obvious that lots of drives were readable (that’s how they retrieved data from other people’s in-boxes), then we’re left to wonder what percentage. Without knowing that, we’ve got no basis to conclude that a pure accident is not believable.
(Also, Lerner’s drive is said to have crashed in 2011. That’s before anybody knew Congress had any interest in her whatsoever, and certainly not “just as a congressional investigation was beginning.”)
The notion of only keeping email backups for six months is not at all unbelievable, given what I’ve seen companies do. At my own employer, we’ve got a somewhat different setup than the IRS (and better in some ways–a desktop crash can’t lose email), but if an employee deleted an important email, we would only be able to retrieve it for about a month; after that it would only be retrievable if the other party/ies still have it in their email folder. Our management has decided that is an acceptable risk. Email is a lower priority than, e.g., the main database or some of our scanned data, and the cost/benefit ratio doesn’t justify devoting significant resources to old email backups.
At previous employers, I’ve seen similar decisions. There’s not enough money to preserve everything indefinitely, so you make trade-offs. And even when you think you’re covered, technology can still bite you in the behind. For example, in my state the office of vital statistics one year was going through boxes of paper birth certificates in the month before school started, because a faulty disk drive took down their entire storage array. (They spent close to seven figures cleaning up that mess; officially they lost no data, although parts of their system were offline for a month. Unofficially, reports are they never did get all their data back.)
I’d think there would have to be at least a couple of people involved. Your average beurocratic paper pusher isn’t going to be removing hard drives from computers, so there was probably someone from the IT department doing the grunt work. Presumably, this was done on orders from one of the high muckety-mucks at the IRS.
Since this was all about targeting right-wing groups for (illegal) scrutiny, I’m going to say that, yes, the people involved were Democrats
And the conspiracy did fall apart quickly, as it quickly became apparent that the cover story was eye-rollingly implausible.
I was thinking of the IT people involved in the data recovery attempts. All democrats? Everyone involved would have to be on board. I find that as difficult to believe as multiple drive crashes.
A virus, perhaps? A virus like the one loosed upon Iran’s centrifuges, with coding that enable the virus to choose the appropriate target drives, FUBAR the targets on a given date, and erase itself?
