More IRS E-Mail Missing

In Politico, Rachael Bade, said this about the new round of e-mail exposures at IRS:

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, in a report sent to the committees investigating whether the IRS unfairly targeted conservative groups in recent years, said 18 of the 82 people “had some type of technical computer issue” between September 2009 and February 2014. Five of those “had hard drive issues that resulted in a probable loss of emails during portions of the four-year period.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/irs-emails-lost-110648.html#ixzz3CcQ0AWzq

Now, maybe you can swallow the idea that a significant number of people who are being investigated for conspiracy could lose their e-mails, in a such a long period, but very few of us in IT ever could.  In the annals of public misconduct, this certainly has to rival the former Governor of Virginia, who as a Republican, was rightly targeted by the Justice Department.  He violated Federal law, but not State law.

If the IRS is this bad in IT, then they certainly should have removed their CIO by now.  If Congress turns in November, the Commissioner will be gone and there will be investigations like you have never seen.  But, in the meantime...

We are asked to believe that the IRS is technically incompetent, badly managed, apolitical, and is telling the truth to Congressional Committees trying to investigate them.  None of those things are true, and never have been.  IRS had IBM computers for a long time before some of the civil agencies understood what they could be used for.  They haven't done real well with them, but they were far from this kind of neglect.  Those e-mails are out there, unless somebody systematically went about getting rid of them.  Not even the most incompetent organization on the planet has no backups of e-mails.

IRS is managed well in most of the Regional Service Centers or they couldn't possibly handle the number of tax returns we have going to them.  Most of the people who work for IRS are dedicated and civil to the customers they serve.  Big customer service organizations all have some trouble, but the distinguishing feature of them is they get to solving those and try to improve.  If they were having these kind of e-mail problems, which most certainly must have had links back to somebody high up in the current administration to require such an effort, they should have been corrected.  Looks like they were.

They are probably one of the most political groups on the earth, with a bundle of political appointees, many of whom are being investigated.  Yes, they are government employees, but they aren't the regular Civil Service people who bust they backsides every day to make a living.  These are political hacks who take their direction from the top.  There are thousands of them in government, and try as they might, they can't cover that part up.

We have seen this kind of incredible argument made before by people who thought the American pubic was not paying attention, naive, ill-informed and didn't care.  This is one of those cases where somebody cared enough for all of them to decide to lose their e-mails after the investigation started.  They are trying to manufacture a long-term break down in IRS computing which does not exist, to cover the fact that these e-mails are missing, or can't be found.  Somebody knows where they are and you can bet, more than one IRS employee is holding onto them.  Which side that person is on is something that will eventually come out.