If they (the IRS) paid an outside contractor to do the video training module, then $60k is not off the charts expensive. Quality video work is expensive as all hell. Luckily for me I have a guy on my payroll with 30 plus years experience as a videographer. If I calculate how much it costa for us to make an 10 minute mini-module, it’s somewhere in the 6 to 7 thousand dollar range. Figure a half day shoot and then 5 days of editing and cleaning up.
The reality is that, in many cases, making a $60k video might be the fiscally responsible thing when costs are compared to doing live classroom training.
Then what I should have said is either/or, either funding is not a problem, or funding is a problem but they can’t be trusted to spend additional funds responsibly.
Every individual and every organization wastes money. I’m not seeing anything that tells me the IRS is any worse than most. If you think $60,000 for a professionally done video is a lot of money, you must not work with a large organization. Could they trim their conference spending? Maybe. Would that give them the resources to prevent loss of data? Probably not.
This just in (for me anyway). The nations top archivest testified that the I.R.S. broke the law by not reporting the loss of data. The A.P. has a story on it. I’d link to it but hate inserting links from my phone.
The story about the failed drive doesn’t pass the smell test. The story about not having backups doesn’t pass the smell test. The story about the data being unrecoverable doesn’t pass the smell test. For the record, my first project at my present job was building a disaster recovery system for the company. The old Dr site was closed down and we setup a new one. We are not quite fully setup. If we go down there are some manual changes (dns, etc) that will have to be manually changed if our main site goes down. However all our data, including emails, is replicated and backed up. We do this in part because the government contracts require it.
This appears to me, assuming there was no intentional cover up, to be a systemic failure of the I.T. leadership in the I.R.S. If any company I have worked for in the last 20 years handled their data this way they would be sued out of business in a heartbeat right after every single person on the I.T. staff was fired. Hell, at my last company we had a San failure that killed all our data. For a few minutes it appeared our backup failed as well. The C.I.O made the comment that if the backup was truly dead we would all be job hunting the next day. Thankfully, the issue turned out to be a minor config problem.
Not only that, but has the IRS informed all other litigants or FOIA requesters that they lost a ton of emails? Or is this the kind of thing that only happened to the emails in THIS particular case?
I was skeptical until I read this link. Yeah, it could happen.
"The IRS had a policy of backing up the data on its email server (which runs Microsoft Outlook) every day. It kept a backup of the records for six months on digital tape, according to a letter sent from the IRS to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). After six months, the IRS would reuse those tapes for newer backups. "
In the past at my company, I could recall email from years past. We now use Gmail. The limit I believe is (total) size, not time. I dunno… Thanks Richard Parker for the post.
In an organisation like the IRS I would imagine that there are probably two types of communications - or if you like, two types of back-ups.
“This is the official word” - or the type that gets printed /archived
Day to day communications - of the type that might (for example) be used to set up an appt for a Q and A on audit issues. Once the appt is passed / official answers filed - that email is superfluous right?
Is this the way it is?
Is there any sort of indication that there is any sort of problem with the IRS “official” document filing and retrieval system?
"Ordering the destruction of a hard drive and documenting that process would be handled by trained, certified IT asset managers, according to IAITAM. But the group’s records show that at least three IRS IT asset managers were shuffled out of their positions around the time of the May 2013 inspector general’s report that detailed the agency’s targeting practices.
IAITAM said investigators need to “determine if these in-house IT asset managers were removed from the picture as the IRS email investigation heated up.”
I don’t know what to make of that because I have no idea what “shuffled out” means. Were they taken out back and shot? These are IRS employees. If investigators want to interview those involved with the problematic drives, are they unavailable because they shuffled off somewhere?
Suggestive, but ultimately just bad writing and lousy reporting.
Let’s see: $50M on 220 conferences is $440K per conference. In a $3 trillion Federal budget, I’m supposed to get upset about this?
I’m too lazy to look and see how much the Department of Defense spent on sending its employees to conferences, but I bet it’s a hell of a lot more than any piddling $50M.
Maybe one of the things they need IS more bureaucrats, so they can do proper examinations of each application for nonprofit status, rather than having to rely on keyword searches.
Congress has passed numerous laws that the IRS has been given the responsibility for enforcing. It’s helpful when they can have the manpower to live up to their statutory responsibilities. But everybody loves to hate the IRS, so their budget gets repeatedly whacked.
The piece did say these are questions that need to be answered not that you ought to jump to any conclusions. There is an ongoing investigation. I suspect personnel records, managerial structures etc can all be loooked at. The article exists in order to highlight what investigators need to find answers to.
Yes, you should get upset about this. If this $50 million of Federal money were spent on sending bibles to convert Africans or Asians to Christianity then im sure you would be less willing to dismiss it as a paltry sum.
This republican, Rembiesa, and her organization, IAITAM, are the darlings of conservative bloggers thanks to the Six Bleeding Obvious Questions The IRS Must Answer.
When the first question is poorly phrases innuendo, it makes me wonder about the source. Her first question, if it indeed bears any relevance, should have been “why were A,B and C (names) moved to X,Y and Z (exact places/positions)”.
Guess what? It turns out the e-mails still exist after all. Apparently the backup tapes weren’t lost in some sort of comic misadventure, as the IRS officials initially claimed.
Anyone want to bet that the invesigators sent around a message saying “Hey, we know one of you has the e-mails. First one to cough them up doesn’t get prosecuted”?
That sad irony here is all the faux outrage over the $50 million “wasted” on conferences for IRS employees, and zero outrage over the $50 million pissed away by the republicans creating phony scandals.
But it wasn’t. I’ll grant you, 220 conferences in a two year period seems excessive, but without knowing the reasons for them, I can’t judge the appropriateness.
It’s a large agency. 50 states with regional offices, two conferences per state, plus a few on the national level. It’s not hard to get to 110. The cost per conference, on the other hand, and whether or not they really need to have that many is a separate argument.
My wife used to go to at least four per year when she worked for GAO in Alaska during the Bush years. Most of them were team-building conferences and largely a waste of time, but it involved flying to Seattle, renting a car and staying in hotels, so it couldn’t have been cheap for the taxpayer, since they were NW regional office conferences. These are budgeted every year and approved by WDC. The IRS is no different than any other federal agency when it comes to this sort of thing, and it’s certainly not new to this administration. If this so-called scandal hadn’t occurred, it would never have become the source of RO that it has.