THat’s how my company does it. Perhaps if they wouldn’t throw such expensive parties they could afford the basic technology that most companies of comparable size use.
And no, SOX doesn’t apply to the government, but it should. The government should be bound by all laws they impose on the private sector. It is just as important for investigators to be able to access government emails as it is for them to be able to access private sector emails.
Ok so adaher was entirely 100% wrong about that law having anything to do with the IRS, and now I look like a fucking idiot for even half trying to defend it. Thanks a fucking lot, adaher. Lesson learned and all.
Disclaimer: I’m a litigation support analyst. I’m the guy that takes over after the litigation hold is in place to collect the email and documents so the attorney can go through it, and produce it to the other side. So I’m fairly familiar with litigation hold procedures and how companies store their stuff. However, my focus is technical and not legal. So while I know a bunch of the legal stuff, I’m not an expert.
I pit the IRS
We all pit the IRS. It’s the closest thing to a Gestapo that the USA has, although TSA is giving it a run for the money.
This is the Feds we’re talking about. My agency is about a tenth the size of the IRS and we’re still using IE8.
There are a lot of reasons to have record retention policies. SOX is not one of them for the IRS. Even if we are talking about private companies - SOX doesn’t apply to all of them.
Different industries will have different retention requirements. Anything beyond that is company policy. I’m sure he IRS is subject to various retention policies and potentially regulation. The question is if they were in compliance.
Read the OP. I never claimed the IRS was subject to the law, I only said that companies were subject to the law.
It was Skywatcher who got confused on the point and you were responding to that poster.
The only confusion here seems to be you using SOX to back up your claim that companies are leagally required to hold emails for 7 years when the text of the Act apparently says no such thing.
You seem to be unfamiliar with something called rulemaking. In any case, I did say companies were subject to the act and I never implied that the IRS was. I was only noting that the IRS has much lower standards than the private sector when it comes to handling crucial documentation.
For the record:
The IRS is beyond reproach, they are perfect in every way. The people who work there are the kindest, most honest and delightful people this great country has to offer. Management at the agency is a model of efficiency, fairness and and incorruptibility. The US tax code is the best of everything it is to be human, our finest achievement as a species.
Now can I have my summer cottage back?
Well, I have to admit that this whole 2 years of emails lost thing had me a little worried, but now that adaher has chimed in on the IRS’s bad faith, I know it was an actual glitch and not an attempt to get out of handing them to Congress.
I work for a public company that is a component of the S&P 500. All of our emails are automatically deleted after six to eighteen months. The act does not apply to emails.
If that is true, your company is opening itself to losing any litigation in which it is involved - “spoilation”. But then I don’t think it is deleting those emails. I think it is archiving them. YOU don’t see them but the company can produce them on demand.
I do think it’s stretching it to call emails a form of audit records. I’ve never heard of any company producing emails at an audit. Audits are all about financial transactions and audit records would be documents showing the company had paid out or received money.
Does spoilation apply here? My understanding is that spoilation can only be invoked if a company destroys records after it has reason to believe those records may be asked for in an investigation or lawsuit.
In the example you linked to, Lilly was being sued. But after receiving the lawsuit, it made no effort to stop the ongoing deletion of old records and a judge ruled against it for this. But there’s no mention of Lilly being held responsible for the deletion of records that occurred before the lawsuit was filed.
So hajario’s company may be acting in response to this principle. It’s destroying its records on an ongoing basis while it’s legal to do so. That way, if there is some investigation or lawsuit in the future, the records will have already been destroyed.
This is exactly how it was explained to us when we were presented with the new policy. They didn’t put it quite so plainly though. We had just been through a huge nuisance law suit by a much larger competitor whose only goal, in my opinion, was to impede our progress.
Required by what? Not SOX.
http://lawmh.com/uploads/files/Avoiding%20the%20Spoliation%20Trap.pdf
Federal and state case law both provide that the duty to preserve material evidence arises not only during litigation, but before litigation when a party reasonably should know that the evidence may be relevant to anticipated litigation.
When working at a big financial company, I was told that since it can be argued that litigation is always anticipated, any destruction of communications is spoilation.
You want to hold the IRS to higher standards? Tell your local Congresscritter that the IRS needs more funding so they can improve their technology and have more server space so their 90,000 employees can back up all their email for the past however many years.
It’s not about competency but rather technology, and the cost of improving said technology. Or maybe it’s just cheaper for Congres to cover the expense of $10,000,000 every so often for some agency to dig up emails rather than expand their storage space.
The lawyers at my company, who may or may not be competent, disagree.