IRS Apologizes For Targeting Conservative Political Groups In 2012 Ele (1 Viewer)

[The Commish]

So the IRS recycled Lerner's hard drive, seems like an innocent action to take unless of course the hard drive belonged to an official who took the 5th amendment so as to not incriminate herself.

The silence is deafening on this topic...can anyone really believe this was just a coincidence...hopefully we have a "deep throat" part two as this is the direction this story is taking...

What data was believed to be on the hard drive that has folks up in arms? The emails or some other documents? If it's just the emails, I don't see the big deal.

Who was directing the targeting of Tea Party groups.

In document form or emails? Seems bizarre that actual documents would be written and saved.....sorry for the dumb questions. Haven't paid a lot of attention. Trying to get away from the SSDD stuff with our gov't.

It was the hard drives of her and six other persons of interest that have gone missing. What is of interest are the emails that would have been external ones -- ones sent to other agencies, The White House, etc. -- that both the House and Senate committees were interested in because those emails would show if the targeting of conservative groups for non-profit status was a coordinated effort. The time period during which the targeting would have happened is exactly the time period for which they have gone missing.

According to the IRS's own Congressional testimony, all emails are supposed to be backed up, and according to many sources, Congress was assured back in March that they were indeed available. A quote from an article written on June 15th by John Fund.

In March of this year, John Koskinen, the new IRS commissioner, testified before Congress that all the e-mails of IRS employees are “stored in servers.” The agency’s own manual specifies that it “provides for backup and recovery of records to protect against information loss or corruption.” The reason is simple. It is well known in legal and IT circles that failure to preserve e-mails can lead to a court ruling of “spoliation of evidence.” That means a judge or jury is then instructed to treat deletions as if they were deliberate destruction of incriminating evidence.

Why is the loss of the Lerner e-mails particularly important? Last year’s report by the IRS inspector general set out a timeline of the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups. A full 16 of the 26 non-redacted events in the inspector general’s timeline took place during the period for which all of Lerner’s e-mails were “lost,” and these 16 instances refer to “e-mail” as the source for information on that event. As tax expert Alan Joel points out, much of the context about how the IRS scandal developed and who may have known about it is now “lost” in the black hole the Lerner e-mails are supposed to have been sucked into.

It's my understanding that they are claiming that just Lerner's emails are unrecoverable...is that true? They are claiming that the only place those emails were stored were on her hard drive?

 

[Sand]

So the IRS recycled Lerner's hard drive, seems like an innocent action to take unless of course the hard drive belonged to an official who took the 5th amendment so as to not incriminate herself.

The silence is deafening on this topic...can anyone really believe this was just a coincidence...hopefully we have a "deep throat" part two as this is the direction this story is taking...

What data was believed to be on the hard drive that has folks up in arms? The emails or some other documents? If it's just the emails, I don't see the big deal.

I'm not in IT, but I've worked on several cases where electronic data was required to be produced and have seen several instances where email backup tapes were reused after 6 months or so of storage.

Anything destroyed after a stop order was in place is wrong and the IRS should be grilled if that indeed happened. But if Lerners emails were destroyed due to a systemic backup process, this will turn out to be yet another "conspiracy" where conservatives jumped the gun w/o considering the facts.

Yet federal law specifies the retention policies of these institutions. And it has to be longer than 6 months or whatever they used to recycle those tapes. From a common sense point of view an agency that requires people to keep records for 7 years for tax purposes should have an internal email retention policy at least that long. Even you can't argue this.

 

[SaintsInDome2006]

So the IRS recycled Lerner's hard drive, seems like an innocent action to take unless of course the hard drive belonged to an official who took the 5th amendment so as to not incriminate herself.

The silence is deafening on this topic...can anyone really believe this was just a coincidence...hopefully we have a "deep throat" part two as this is the direction this story is taking...

What data was believed to be on the hard drive that has folks up in arms? The emails or some other documents? If it's just the emails, I don't see the big deal.

I'm not in IT, but I've worked on several cases where electronic data was required to be produced and have seen several instances where email backup tapes were reused after 6 months or so of storage.

Anything destroyed after a stop order was in place is wrong and the IRS should be grilled if that indeed happened. But if Lerners emails were destroyed due to a systemic backup process, this will turn out to be yet another "conspiracy" where conservatives jumped the gun w/o considering the facts.

Well, I believe the House first started to inquire about this issue back at the beginning of June 2011 when Dave Camp (House Ways & Means Chairman) wrote a letter inquiring about conservative groups being targeted by the IRS. The IRS responded on July 1st 2011 denying there was anything political to the work they were conducting. Near the end of July 2011 there are emails (ones that were recovered) from Lerner and an IRS tech person claiming they couldn't recover the hard drive. I don't think anything was destroyed after a stop order was in place but the drive was destroyed fairly soon after House Republicans were investigating the matter. I wouldn't call it a smoking gun but it certainly doesn't smell right especially when you factor in that they didn't reveal the missing emails/hard drive until just recently and oh, by the way the same goes for 6 other people involved in the investigation.

If a large corporation did that they would be facing one seriously ticked off judge and maybe millions in penalties.

 

[Sand]

So the IRS recycled Lerner's hard drive, seems like an innocent action to take unless of course the hard drive belonged to an official who took the 5th amendment so as to not incriminate herself.

The silence is deafening on this topic...can anyone really believe this was just a coincidence...hopefully we have a "deep throat" part two as this is the direction this story is taking...

What data was believed to be on the hard drive that has folks up in arms? The emails or some other documents? If it's just the emails, I don't see the big deal.

Who was directing the targeting of Tea Party groups.

In document form or emails? Seems bizarre that actual documents would be written and saved.....sorry for the dumb questions. Haven't paid a lot of attention. Trying to get away from the SSDD stuff with our gov't.

It was the hard drives of her and six other persons of interest that have gone missing. What is of interest are the emails that would have been external ones -- ones sent to other agencies, The White House, etc. -- that both the House and Senate committees were interested in because those emails would show if the targeting of conservative groups for non-profit status was a coordinated effort. The time period during which the targeting would have happened is exactly the time period for which they have gone missing.

According to the IRS's own Congressional testimony, all emails are supposed to be backed up, and according to many sources, Congress was assured back in March that they were indeed available. A quote from an article written on June 15th by John Fund.

In March of this year, John Koskinen, the new IRS commissioner, testified before Congress that all the e-mails of IRS employees are “stored in servers.” The agency’s own manual specifies that it “provides for backup and recovery of records to protect against information loss or corruption.” The reason is simple. It is well known in legal and IT circles that failure to preserve e-mails can lead to a court ruling of “spoliation of evidence.” That means a judge or jury is then instructed to treat deletions as if they were deliberate destruction of incriminating evidence.

Why is the loss of the Lerner e-mails particularly important? Last year’s report by the IRS inspector general set out a timeline of the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups. A full 16 of the 26 non-redacted events in the inspector general’s timeline took place during the period for which all of Lerner’s e-mails were “lost,” and these 16 instances refer to “e-mail” as the source for information on that event. As tax expert Alan Joel points out, much of the context about how the IRS scandal developed and who may have known about it is now “lost” in the black hole the Lerner e-mails are supposed to have been sucked into.

It's my understanding that they are claiming that just Lerner's emails are unrecoverable...is that true? They are claiming that the only place those emails were stored were on her hard drive?

And that the backups were recycled after a short period of time.

 

[tommyGunZ]

So the IRS recycled Lerner's hard drive, seems like an innocent action to take unless of course the hard drive belonged to an official who took the 5th amendment so as to not incriminate herself.

The silence is deafening on this topic...can anyone really believe this was just a coincidence...hopefully we have a "deep throat" part two as this is the direction this story is taking...

What data was believed to be on the hard drive that has folks up in arms? The emails or some other documents? If it's just the emails, I don't see the big deal.

I'm not in IT, but I've worked on several cases where electronic data was required to be produced and have seen several instances where email backup tapes were reused after 6 months or so of storage.

Anything destroyed after a stop order was in place is wrong and the IRS should be grilled if that indeed happened. But if Lerners emails were destroyed due to a systemic backup process, this will turn out to be yet another "conspiracy" where conservatives jumped the gun w/o considering the facts.

Yet federal law specifies the retention policies of these institutions. And it has to be longer than 6 months or whatever they used to recycle those tapes. From a common sense point of view an agency that requires people to keep records for 7 years for tax purposes should have an internal email retention policy at least that long. Even you can't argue this.

Show me the specific retention policy that was violated and I'll agree. I'm guessing that the retention policy for emails is much shorter than you think.

I love how conservatives want to cut govt spending to the bone, yet when they find out that our agencies are working with 25 year old tech and reusing backup tapes they are outraged. WTF?

 

[tommyGunZ]

So the IRS recycled Lerner's hard drive, seems like an innocent action to take unless of course the hard drive belonged to an official who took the 5th amendment so as to not incriminate herself.

The silence is deafening on this topic...can anyone really believe this was just a coincidence...hopefully we have a "deep throat" part two as this is the direction this story is taking...

What data was believed to be on the hard drive that has folks up in arms? The emails or some other documents? If it's just the emails, I don't see the big deal.

I'm not in IT, but I've worked on several cases where electronic data was required to be produced and have seen several instances where email backup tapes were reused after 6 months or so of storage.

Anything destroyed after a stop order was in place is wrong and the IRS should be grilled if that indeed happened. But if Lerners emails were destroyed due to a systemic backup process, this will turn out to be yet another "conspiracy" where conservatives jumped the gun w/o considering the facts.

Well, I believe the House first started to inquire about this issue back at the beginning of June 2011 when Dave Camp (House Ways & Means Chairman) wrote a letter inquiring about conservative groups being targeted by the IRS. The IRS responded on July 1st 2011 denying there was anything political to the work they were conducting. Near the end of July 2011 there are emails (ones that were recovered) from Lerner and an IRS tech person claiming they couldn't recover the hard drive. I don't think anything was destroyed after a stop order was in place but the drive was destroyed fairly soon after House Republicans were investigating the matter. I wouldn't call it a smoking gun but it certainly doesn't smell right especially when you factor in that they didn't reveal the missing emails/hard drive until just recently and oh, by the way the same goes for 6 other people involved in the investigation.

If a large corporation did that they would be facing one seriously ticked off judge and maybe millions in penalties.

No they wouldn't. Unless they were in violation of a stop order, or violating a legislatively mandated record retention policy, companies can delete emails whenever they want.

 

[3C's]

So the IRS recycled Lerner's hard drive, seems like an innocent action to take unless of course the hard drive belonged to an official who took the 5th amendment so as to not incriminate herself.

The silence is deafening on this topic...can anyone really believe this was just a coincidence...hopefully we have a "deep throat" part two as this is the direction this story is taking...

What data was believed to be on the hard drive that has folks up in arms? The emails or some other documents? If it's just the emails, I don't see the big deal.

I'm not in IT, but I've worked on several cases where electronic data was required to be produced and have seen several instances where email backup tapes were reused after 6 months or so of storage.

Anything destroyed after a stop order was in place is wrong and the IRS should be grilled if that indeed happened. But if Lerners emails were destroyed due to a systemic backup process, this will turn out to be yet another "conspiracy" where conservatives jumped the gun w/o considering the facts.

Yet federal law specifies the retention policies of these institutions. And it has to be longer than 6 months or whatever they used to recycle those tapes. From a common sense point of view an agency that requires people to keep records for 7 years for tax purposes should have an internal email retention policy at least that long. Even you can't argue this.

Show me the specific retention policy that was violated and I'll agree. I'm guessing that the retention policy for emails is much shorter than you think.

I love how conservatives want to cut govt spending to the bone, yet when they find out that our agencies are working with 25 year old tech and reusing backup tapes they are outraged. WTF?

This should be interesting. It's not the first time someone said it but I've yet to see any specifics that state emails must be retained for x amount of years, and more specifically the 7 years that keeps getting thrown out there.

 

[Bogeys]

So the IRS recycled Lerner's hard drive, seems like an innocent action to take unless of course the hard drive belonged to an official who took the 5th amendment so as to not incriminate herself.

The silence is deafening on this topic...can anyone really believe this was just a coincidence...hopefully we have a "deep throat" part two as this is the direction this story is taking...

What data was believed to be on the hard drive that has folks up in arms? The emails or some other documents? If it's just the emails, I don't see the big deal.

I'm not in IT, but I've worked on several cases where electronic data was required to be produced and have seen several instances where email backup tapes were reused after 6 months or so of storage.

Anything destroyed after a stop order was in place is wrong and the IRS should be grilled if that indeed happened. But if Lerners emails were destroyed due to a systemic backup process, this will turn out to be yet another "conspiracy" where conservatives jumped the gun w/o considering the facts.

Yet federal law specifies the retention policies of these institutions. And it has to be longer than 6 months or whatever they used to recycle those tapes. From a common sense point of view an agency that requires people to keep records for 7 years for tax purposes should have an internal email retention policy at least that long. Even you can't argue this.

Show me the specific retention policy that was violated and I'll agree. I'm guessing that the retention policy for emails is much shorter than you think.

I love how conservatives want to cut govt spending to the bone, yet when they find out that our agencies are working with 25 year old tech and reusing backup tapes they are outraged. WTF?

This should be interesting. It's not the first time someone said it but I've yet to see any specifics that state emails must be retained for x amount of years, and more specifically the 7 years that keeps getting thrown out there.

I am the one that said 7 years and was talking about tax records in general, not emails. Sorry I wasn't more clear.

 

[3C's]

So the IRS recycled Lerner's hard drive, seems like an innocent action to take unless of course the hard drive belonged to an official who took the 5th amendment so as to not incriminate herself.

The silence is deafening on this topic...can anyone really believe this was just a coincidence...hopefully we have a "deep throat" part two as this is the direction this story is taking...

What data was believed to be on the hard drive that has folks up in arms? The emails or some other documents? If it's just the emails, I don't see the big deal.

I'm not in IT, but I've worked on several cases where electronic data was required to be produced and have seen several instances where email backup tapes were reused after 6 months or so of storage.

Anything destroyed after a stop order was in place is wrong and the IRS should be grilled if that indeed happened. But if Lerners emails were destroyed due to a systemic backup process, this will turn out to be yet another "conspiracy" where conservatives jumped the gun w/o considering the facts.

Yet federal law specifies the retention policies of these institutions. And it has to be longer than 6 months or whatever they used to recycle those tapes. From a common sense point of view an agency that requires people to keep records for 7 years for tax purposes should have an internal email retention policy at least that long. Even you can't argue this.

Show me the specific retention policy that was violated and I'll agree. I'm guessing that the retention policy for emails is much shorter than you think.

I love how conservatives want to cut govt spending to the bone, yet when they find out that our agencies are working with 25 year old tech and reusing backup tapes they are outraged. WTF?

This should be interesting. It's not the first time someone said it but I've yet to see any specifics that state emails must be retained for x amount of years, and more specifically the 7 years that keeps getting thrown out there.

I am the one that said 7 years and was talking about tax records in general, not emails. Sorry I wasn't more clear.

No, it wasn't you. It was Launch I believe a page or 2 ago.

 

[SaintsInDome2006]

So the IRS recycled Lerner's hard drive, seems like an innocent action to take unless of course the hard drive belonged to an official who took the 5th amendment so as to not incriminate herself.

The silence is deafening on this topic...can anyone really believe this was just a coincidence...hopefully we have a "deep throat" part two as this is the direction this story is taking...

What data was believed to be on the hard drive that has folks up in arms? The emails or some other documents? If it's just the emails, I don't see the big deal.

I'm not in IT, but I've worked on several cases where electronic data was required to be produced and have seen several instances where email backup tapes were reused after 6 months or so of storage.

Anything destroyed after a stop order was in place is wrong and the IRS should be grilled if that indeed happened. But if Lerners emails were destroyed due to a systemic backup process, this will turn out to be yet another "conspiracy" where conservatives jumped the gun w/o considering the facts.

Well, I believe the House first started to inquire about this issue back at the beginning of June 2011 when Dave Camp (House Ways & Means Chairman) wrote a letter inquiring about conservative groups being targeted by the IRS. The IRS responded on July 1st 2011 denying there was anything political to the work they were conducting. Near the end of July 2011 there are emails (ones that were recovered) from Lerner and an IRS tech person claiming they couldn't recover the hard drive. I don't think anything was destroyed after a stop order was in place but the drive was destroyed fairly soon after House Republicans were investigating the matter. I wouldn't call it a smoking gun but it certainly doesn't smell right especially when you factor in that they didn't reveal the missing emails/hard drive until just recently and oh, by the way the same goes for 6 other people involved in the investigation.

If a large corporation did that they would be facing one seriously ticked off judge and maybe millions in penalties.

No they wouldn't. Unless they were in violation of a stop order, or violating a legislatively mandated record retention policy, companies can delete emails whenever they want.

Pretty sure we could find the actual retention notice, it's posted on the House notice about the destroyed emails.

 

[tommyGunZ]

So the IRS recycled Lerner's hard drive, seems like an innocent action to take unless of course the hard drive belonged to an official who took the 5th amendment so as to not incriminate herself.

The silence is deafening on this topic...can anyone really believe this was just a coincidence...hopefully we have a "deep throat" part two as this is the direction this story is taking...

What data was believed to be on the hard drive that has folks up in arms? The emails or some other documents? If it's just the emails, I don't see the big deal.

I'm not in IT, but I've worked on several cases where electronic data was required to be produced and have seen several instances where email backup tapes were reused after 6 months or so of storage.

Anything destroyed after a stop order was in place is wrong and the IRS should be grilled if that indeed happened. But if Lerners emails were destroyed due to a systemic backup process, this will turn out to be yet another "conspiracy" where conservatives jumped the gun w/o considering the facts.

Well, I believe the House first started to inquire about this issue back at the beginning of June 2011 when Dave Camp (House Ways & Means Chairman) wrote a letter inquiring about conservative groups being targeted by the IRS. The IRS responded on July 1st 2011 denying there was anything political to the work they were conducting. Near the end of July 2011 there are emails (ones that were recovered) from Lerner and an IRS tech person claiming they couldn't recover the hard drive. I don't think anything was destroyed after a stop order was in place but the drive was destroyed fairly soon after House Republicans were investigating the matter. I wouldn't call it a smoking gun but it certainly doesn't smell right especially when you factor in that they didn't reveal the missing emails/hard drive until just recently and oh, by the way the same goes for 6 other people involved in the investigation.

If a large corporation did that they would be facing one seriously ticked off judge and maybe millions in penalties.

No they wouldn't. Unless they were in violation of a stop order, or violating a legislatively mandated record retention policy, companies can delete emails whenever they want.

Pretty sure we could find the actual retention notice, it's posted on the House notice about the destroyed emails.

Knock yourself out.m I have no desire to do so, b/c if record retention policies were violated, it will come out.

 

[timschochet]

It comes down to screwup or deliberate, right?

No matter how unlikely it seems, my money in these cases is always going to be on screwup. Conspiracies do happen, but they're exceedingly rare.

 

[The Commish]

Yet federal law specifies the retention policies of these institutions. And it has to be longer than 6 months or whatever they used to recycle those tapes. From a common sense point of view an agency that requires people to keep records for 7 years for tax purposes should have an internal email retention policy at least that long. Even you can't argue this.

This isn't correct. Your tax records are a different classification of information than email. They typically aren't, nor have they ever been, held to the same retention standards. Thus the questions I was asking above. Our company's policy is around the person's inbox....you can keep up to 9 months of emails there. If you want to keep them longer than that, you create another place to keep them or back them up yourself.

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

Megan McArdle (a "responsible" conservative journalist if ever there was one) did the same thing in the Atlantic a day ago, blah blah blah.

I wouldn't call her conservative, but I agree that she's a responsible journalist. She's also particularly knowledgeable about this subject because before she was a journalist, she was an IT system administrator who worked with precisely the type of email system that the IRS appears to be using. (That was over a decade ago, but the IRS is technologically that far behind.)

Here's her article from today.

An IRS Conspiracy? Not Likely ... Yet

JUN 19, 2014 10:54 AM EDT

By Megan McArdle

Yesterday, I wrote about the news that the Internal Revenue Service could not recover two years' worth of e-mails from Lois Lerner’s hard drive. Almost as soon as the post went up, I saw the National Review reporting that it wasn’t just Lerner: Documents from six other people, including the former chief of staff to the commissioner, are also unrecoverable. I put in a query to the House Ways and Means committee, but all I heard back was that they, too, are waiting for more details.

A lot of people have asked me whether this makes me less likely to believe in an innocent explanation. The answer is that I don’t know what to think, because I don’t yet understand what we’re talking about: a couple of corrupted Word documents, six more hard drive failures? I have queries into the IRS and the House Ways and Means Committee trying to clarify this question. Meanwhile, because a lot of you are asking, here are my provisional thoughts:

1. I have heard from a number of federal employees who lost data in exactly the way Lois Lerner did.

2. I have also heard from a federal employee who says all of her e-mails have to be archived, on a server. The agency that the latter person works for is, let’s just say, not known as a leading light of federal competence.

3. I am inherently suspicious of any suggestion of a conspiracy, particularly one involving civil-service employees. Not because I think especially highly of civil servants, but because conspiracies are hard to get together, and hard to keep together -- someone is likely to blab. Civil servants have a lot to lose by helping political appointees pursue their partisan agendas and no particular reason to be helpful. If it turns out that the IRS engaged in wrongful conduct, I will be inclined to credit complex sociology-of-organizations explanations (where everyone at the IRS shares an unspoken and perhaps unrecognized belief that people who campaign against taxation are clearly political ideologues, while people who campaign for more environmental spending are just swell, public-spirited folks trying to save the planet). It will take a lot to convince me that career employees at the IRS sat down and deliberately and knowingly engaged in illegal targeting of conservative groups for the purpose of helping Democrats win elections. It will take even more to convince me that they blatantly coordinated with the White House, which would obviously be a ticket to loss of job, pension and benefits, plus maybe a side trip to the pokey.

4. It would be phenomenally stupid for Lerner and others, if they were engaged in such a knowing conspiracy, to use their work e-mail accounts to coordinate it, rather than just calling each other on the telephone or, in extremis, using secret outside e-mail accounts.

5. Even if there was such a conspiracy, the odds that people who were not initially involved in it decided, after the fact, to help them cover it up seem pretty low to me. At least one tech person would have to be involved, and why should they attach themselves to someone else’s felony? If there was a cover-up, the most likely story is a single person deciding to get rid of evidence after Representative David Camp sent a letter asking about targeting of conservative groups. The second-most-likely story is a small group of people decided to do the same, perhaps with the help of a friendly person in the IT department. The least likely -- in fact, frankly unbelievable -- possibility is that the IRS as an institution is actively destroying evidence to cover up wrongdoing.

6. It is not particularly easy for a non-technically-savvy user to fake the problem the IRS documents say that Lois Lerner had. I could do it pretty easily, with pretty high confidence that I wouldn’t get caught. But I worked in tech. The average person wouldn’t know how far back the backups went, or how to create an unrecoverable issue with her hard drive. And anything she did to fake an accident would have involved some risk of getting caught -- and making everything much, much worse.

7. That said, it’s possible that Lerner, or one of her close friends or relatives, does have these sorts of technical skills. This is one place where a larger conspiracy helps: the more people involved, the more likely one of them is to have a dear one who could walk the team through the process of faking a catastrophic data loss.

8. Because this problem does seem to be genuinely common in the federal government, Lerner might well have been aware that lost archives couldn’t be easily recovered.

9. If Lerner destroyed her hard drive, odds are nearly 100 percent that she Googled instructions for doing so from either her home or work computer. I’ve heard it suggested that her Google searches from June 2011 might be recoverable with a subpoena.

10. It is easier to fake a problem if no one is looking for it. At the time of Lerner’s hard drive failure, there would have been no reason to suspect anything except a normal accident. And it’s unlikely that anyone would have taken particularly heroic measures to get data off the drive; those measures are expensive, and Lerner’s e-mails to the tech people emphasize that she was looking to recover personal files, not work files that might be potentially of interest to investigators.

11. Coincidences do happen. I once sat down next to a small conference in Italy and realized that the guy sitting next to me was my college roommate’s best friend, with whom I had wandered around our campus one lovely spring night 20 years before. What are the odds? But there you are: However small the odds, it did happen.

12. Groups do manage to get themselves together to do crazy dangerous things, even though this seems, well, crazy and dangerous. The fact that Watergate happened at all is, in retrospect, completely amazing: How did all these guys agree to commit felonies for such a trivial potential payoff? But they did. The tech guys at Bernie Madoff’s firm did decide to help him cover up his Ponzi scheme. Groups of civil servants have gotten together for massive embezzlement schemes. So the fact that a conspiracy is really unlikely doesn’t actually make it impossible.

13. For the moment, I am going to assume that the additional six sets of lost documents are less interesting than they sound in a news release, because most things are less interesting than they sound in news releases. It is very easy to imagine that they could have lost a couple of documents apiece for six different employees during the course of normal business. To be clear, of course six tragic hard drive failures in a relatively short period of time would make it very hard to believe in a benign explanation. As Lady Bracknell said of parents, “To lose one may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.” To lose six looks like . . . something quite a bit worse than carelessness. But I reiterate that we don’t yet know that this is what happened; we just know that the House Ways and Means Committee says that documents are missing for at least six more employees. How many? What kind? How were they lost? I’ll need to know that before I render judgment.

14. The IRS did not do itself any favors by sitting on this for months; it appears to have known about this problem as early as February. In the intervening months, e-mails at other agencies that could have been discovered may have been lost. As Naomi Goodno says, “If this discovery issue had arisen in federal court, the IRS would have likely been subject to monetary sanctions and possibly an adverse inference instruction. Shouldn't the IRS be held to these standards?” At this point, I think calls for an outside investigation are justified.

15. I really wish someone at the IRS would return my e-mail and explain what happened.

I assume at some point we’ll get more detail. When that happens, you can expect me to write more. Until then, that’s all I’ve got: It remains possible that there was some sort of attempt to destroy evidence, but without more information, this is not necessarily the most likely possibility.

 

[Sand]

Yet federal law specifies the retention policies of these institutions. And it has to be longer than 6 months or whatever they used to recycle those tapes. From a common sense point of view an agency that requires people to keep records for 7 years for tax purposes should have an internal email retention policy at least that long. Even you can't argue this.

This isn't correct. Your tax records are a different classification of information than email. They typically aren't, nor have they ever been, held to the same retention standards. Thus the questions I was asking above. Our company's policy is around the person's inbox....you can keep up to 9 months of emails there. If you want to keep them longer than that, you create another place to keep them or back them up yourself.

According to this article (which references the actual federal rules) any deletion of records must be preceded by a notification to the Archivist. I still think this is gross incompetence, but do find it pretty ironic that the one agency that requires so much record keeping of all Americans can't hold on to a set of emails to save their lives. Notifying Congress one year after the fact about this was blindingly stupid. Whomever made that decision should be fired for simply being an idiot and causing this mess.

 

[Sand]

It comes down to screwup or deliberate, right?

No matter how unlikely it seems, my money in these cases is always going to be on screwup. Conspiracies do happen, but they're exceedingly rare.

IMO, the deletions were screwups. The notification delay was deliberate.

 

[tommyboy]

they destroyed the hard drives. I hope many people go to jail.

and, if/when I get audited I'm for sure going to tell them that I lost all my data and my hard drive was destroyed. #### them.

 

[The Commish]

Yet federal law specifies the retention policies of these institutions. And it has to be longer than 6 months or whatever they used to recycle those tapes. From a common sense point of view an agency that requires people to keep records for 7 years for tax purposes should have an internal email retention policy at least that long. Even you can't argue this.

This isn't correct. Your tax records are a different classification of information than email. They typically aren't, nor have they ever been, held to the same retention standards. Thus the questions I was asking above. Our company's policy is around the person's inbox....you can keep up to 9 months of emails there. If you want to keep them longer than that, you create another place to keep them or back them up yourself.

According to this article (which references the actual federal rules) any deletion of records must be preceded by a notification to the Archivist. I still think this is gross incompetence, but do find it pretty ironic that the one agency that requires so much record keeping of all Americans can't hold on to a set of emails to save their lives. Notifying Congress one year after the fact about this was blindingly stupid. Whomever made that decision should be fired for simply being an idiot and causing this mess.

Right. Your problem seems to be that you believe that records = emails. That's not true. That's all I'm saying.

There is plenty of wrong going on here, but what you're focused on doesn't really matter. I'm still working on getting all the "facts" to this, but there's something very suspicious about a scenario where an individual's or select few individuals' emails for a period of time are gone or that IT claims the only place they are held is on a hard drive. That simply makes no sense. If emails from a point in time and prior are missing, that falls in line with retention policy, but "holes" in those timelines are not supported by retention policies.

 

[tommyGunZ]

they destroyed the hard drives. I hope many people go to jail.

and, if/when I get audited I'm for sure going to tell them that I lost all my data and my hard drive was destroyed. #### them.

Good luck with that.

 

[rockaction]

Megan McArdle (a "responsible" conservative journalist if ever there was one) did the same thing in the Atlantic a day ago, blah blah blah.

I wouldn't call her conservative, but I agree that she's a responsible journalist. She's also particularly knowledgeable about this subject because before she was a journalist, she was an IT system administrator who worked with precisely the type of email system that the IRS appears to be using. (That was over a decade ago, but the IRS is technologically that far behind.)

Here's her article from today.

An IRS Conspiracy? Not Likely ... Yet

JUN 19, 2014 10:54 AM EDT

By Megan McArdle

Yesterday, I wrote about the news that the Internal Revenue Service could not recover two years' worth of e-mails from Lois Lerner’s hard drive. Almost as soon as the post went up, I saw the National Review reporting that it wasn’t just Lerner: Documents from six other people, including the former chief of staff to the commissioner, are also unrecoverable. I put in a query to the House Ways and Means committee, but all I heard back was that they, too, are waiting for more details.

11. Coincidences do happen. I once sat down next to a small conference in Italy and realized that the guy sitting next to me was my college roommate’s best friend, with whom I had wandered around our campus one lovely spring night 20 years before. What are the odds? But there you are: However small the odds, it did happen.

I did know about the IT from yesterday. I just didn't go into it, because I know very little about it, which now seems to be the crux of the matter.

I'm just curious what you would call her. A fusionist? A libertarian? Liberaltarian? Or non-ideological with a right-wing bent? I'm not sure. You're absolutely right to not call her "conservative" in the Will or Buckley sense. Wiki calls her "right-libertarian." I thought this, but should have clarified for the board. I just figured "conservative" would be a kind of shorthand. I also think I may have called her conservative because she kind of is, in the traditional sense of cautiousness and a willingness to engage in an intellectual dialectic with the other side.

I love line number 11 for some reason. Not laughing at it, just kind of a nice anecdote. I remember walking around campuses at twilight with people that it would be cool to see again one night in Italy. Nice life.

Also, thanks for the posts from everyone. They're helping to clarify my reasoning. At first, all I wanted was people to let it play out, then I kind of jumped the gun, too. This coincidence just looks so bad. I'll take my own advice, I guess, and wait.

I should also add that I'm really skeptical about all of this. I'm not sure we'll ever get an answer that is satisfactory. That's frustrating.

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

I'm just curious what you would call her. A fusionist? A libertarian? Liberaltarian? Or non-ideological with a right-wing bent? I'm not sure. You're absolutely right to not call her "conservative" in the Will or Buckley sense. Wiki calls her "right-libertarian." I thought this, but should have clarified for the board. I just figured "conservative" would be a kind of shorthand.

I think the bold is pretty close, but with a lot more emphasis on "non-ideological" than "with a right-wing bent."

 

[SaintsInDome2006]

So the IRS recycled Lerner's hard drive, seems like an innocent action to take unless of course the hard drive belonged to an official who took the 5th amendment so as to not incriminate herself.

The silence is deafening on this topic...can anyone really believe this was just a coincidence...hopefully we have a "deep throat" part two as this is the direction this story is taking...

What data was believed to be on the hard drive that has folks up in arms? The emails or some other documents? If it's just the emails, I don't see the big deal.

I'm not in IT, but I've worked on several cases where electronic data was required to be produced and have seen several instances where email backup tapes were reused after 6 months or so of storage.

Anything destroyed after a stop order was in place is wrong and the IRS should be grilled if that indeed happened. But if Lerners emails were destroyed due to a systemic backup process, this will turn out to be yet another "conspiracy" where conservatives jumped the gun w/o considering the facts.

Well, I believe the House first started to inquire about this issue back at the beginning of June 2011 when Dave Camp (House Ways & Means Chairman) wrote a letter inquiring about conservative groups being targeted by the IRS. The IRS responded on July 1st 2011 denying there was anything political to the work they were conducting. Near the end of July 2011 there are emails (ones that were recovered) from Lerner and an IRS tech person claiming they couldn't recover the hard drive. I don't think anything was destroyed after a stop order was in place but the drive was destroyed fairly soon after House Republicans were investigating the matter. I wouldn't call it a smoking gun but it certainly doesn't smell right especially when you factor in that they didn't reveal the missing emails/hard drive until just recently and oh, by the way the same goes for 6 other people involved in the investigation.

If a large corporation did that they would be facing one seriously ticked off judge and maybe millions in penalties.

No they wouldn't. Unless they were in violation of a stop order, or violating a legislatively mandated record retention policy, companies can delete emails whenever they want.

Pretty sure we could find the actual retention notice, it's posted on the House notice about the destroyed emails.

Knock yourself out.m I have no desire to do so, b/c if record retention policies were violated, it will come out.

Sure enough, I'm certainly ok with due process.

 

[RCon]

Yet federal law specifies the retention policies of these institutions. And it has to be longer than 6 months or whatever they used to recycle those tapes. From a common sense point of view an agency that requires people to keep records for 7 years for tax purposes should have an internal email retention policy at least that long. Even you can't argue this.

This isn't correct. Your tax records are a different classification of information than email. They typically aren't, nor have they ever been, held to the same retention standards. Thus the questions I was asking above. Our company's policy is around the person's inbox....you can keep up to 9 months of emails there. If you want to keep them longer than that, you create another place to keep them or back them up yourself.

The bolded is a TERRIBLE company policy, and will get the company in trouble with a judge some day. If there's one thing a judge doesn't want to see, it's an arbitrary policy in which end-users can decide for themselves how long the retention should be.

Regarding e-mails in particular, the actual policy itself is somewhat irrelevant, as long as it is written, standardized, and followed. "Standardized" could even be "six months for regular users, twelve months for executives". "End-users can copy e-mails to their local hard drive at their own discretion" is not standardized.

 

[RCon]

The bolded is a TERRIBLE company policy, and will get the company in trouble with a judge some day. If there's one thing a judge doesn't want to see, it's an arbitrary policy in which end-users can decide for themselves how long the retention should be.

Regarding e-mails in particular, the actual policy itself is somewhat irrelevant, as long as it is written, standardized, and followed. "Standardized" could even be "six months for regular users, twelve months for executives". "End-users can copy e-mails to their local hard drive at their own discretion" is not standardized.

My specific unit wasn't part of the government, but my parent organization was federally funded and we followed all their policies.

Basically from the end user's perspective the "e-mail policy" was to keep everything until you started getting auto-harrassed because your in-box was too big. Then you had to either delete or archive your e-mails. I kept everything for CYA purposes, but I don't recall ever seeing any guidelines about it. Basically you only did it when you needed to make space in your inbox.

Oh, I'm well aware that a lot of companies (and government agencies, for that matter) have arbitrary, end-user decides policies. I'm simply saying that those are bad policies, and those companies should do a better job of standardizing and clarifying their policies.

 

[The Commish]

Yet federal law specifies the retention policies of these institutions. And it has to be longer than 6 months or whatever they used to recycle those tapes. From a common sense point of view an agency that requires people to keep records for 7 years for tax purposes should have an internal email retention policy at least that long. Even you can't argue this.

This isn't correct. Your tax records are a different classification of information than email. They typically aren't, nor have they ever been, held to the same retention standards. Thus the questions I was asking above. Our company's policy is around the person's inbox....you can keep up to 9 months of emails there. If you want to keep them longer than that, you create another place to keep them or back them up yourself.

The bolded is a TERRIBLE company policy, and will get the company in trouble with a judge some day. If there's one thing a judge doesn't want to see, it's an arbitrary policy in which end-users can decide for themselves how long the retention should be.

Regarding e-mails in particular, the actual policy itself is somewhat irrelevant, as long as it is written, standardized, and followed. "Standardized" could even be "six months for regular users, twelve months for executives". "End-users can copy e-mails to their local hard drive at their own discretion" is not standardized.

Not sure I understand. What's the problem with the policy? Email is a form of communication, not documentation. If it's important enough to document, it belongs in a more secure place than your inbox. I don't trust my email as far as I can throw it for those purposes. No one should.

 

[MaxThreshold]

Paul Ryan absolutely lays into the IRS commissioner.

 

[RCon]

Yet federal law specifies the retention policies of these institutions. And it has to be longer than 6 months or whatever they used to recycle those tapes. From a common sense point of view an agency that requires people to keep records for 7 years for tax purposes should have an internal email retention policy at least that long. Even you can't argue this.

This isn't correct. Your tax records are a different classification of information than email. They typically aren't, nor have they ever been, held to the same retention standards. Thus the questions I was asking above. Our company's policy is around the person's inbox....you can keep up to 9 months of emails there. If you want to keep them longer than that, you create another place to keep them or back them up yourself.

The bolded is a TERRIBLE company policy, and will get the company in trouble with a judge some day. If there's one thing a judge doesn't want to see, it's an arbitrary policy in which end-users can decide for themselves how long the retention should be.

Regarding e-mails in particular, the actual policy itself is somewhat irrelevant, as long as it is written, standardized, and followed. "Standardized" could even be "six months for regular users, twelve months for executives". "End-users can copy e-mails to their local hard drive at their own discretion" is not standardized.

Not sure I understand. What's the problem with the policy? Email is a form of communication, not documentation. If it's important enough to document, it belongs in a more secure place than your inbox. I don't trust my email as far as I can throw it for those purposes. No one should.

E-mail is very much documentation. It documents who said what to whom, and when. It can document who agreed to what, and when. It can serve as proof that one person provided certain information to another person at a specific time. It's like having official meeting minutes on all correspondence. A company wouldn't let each attendee at a meeting go through the meeting minutes whatever they wanted. E-mail should be the same way.

It's fine if you don't want the e-mail in your Inbox any more, but the company should have a policy regarding how long it keeps copies of e-mails in its archive. Many companies will have multiple policies, such as one retention policy for e-mail within the company and another retention policy for e-mail to/from addresses outside the company.

On a separate note, why wouldn't you trust e-mail for important information? What's "a more secure place"?

 

[Loan Sharks]

Apparently my insurance company has waaaaaaaaaay better documentation and retention policies than the IRS.

Every 12 months we have to go through every document we have including email and rate the business value. and then decide where to store it and for how long. So basically emails like "Free donuts in the break room" stay for 12 months.

Anything with a temporary instruction stays for another year and anything actually involving a claim or permanent change is saved forever and buried in a time capsule or something.

I am not saying conspiracy but to be able to find nothing from 6 people in those positions of responsibility is pretty astonishing to me.

 

[MaxThreshold]

Apparently my insurance company has waaaaaaaaaay better documentation and retention policies than the IRS.

Every 12 months we have to go through every document we have including email and rate the business value. and then decide where to store it and for how long. So basically emails like "Free donuts in the break room" stay for 12 months.

Anything with a temporary instruction stays for another year and anything actually involving a claim or permanent change is saved forever and buried in a time capsule or something.

I am not saying conspiracy but to be able to find nothing from 6 people in those positions of responsibility is pretty astonishing to me.

Yet the IRS expects YOU to keep 7 years worth of documents. In their eyes, you're guilty unless you can provide proof. But we're not supposed to apply the same standards of proof to them in this case.

I hope someone burns for this.

 

[Sand]

According to some sources the IRS did have a third party backup. And that just after the scandal broke the IRS cut ties. Maybe this is coincidence, but the timeline of "investigation started", HD crash, then just after that the email archivist was fired will definitely lead to fuel for the conspiracy fires.

Time for a special prosecutor, methinks. This is a mess and needs a disinterested third party to dig into events here.

 

[SaintsInDome2006]

Yet federal law specifies the retention policies of these institutions. And it has to be longer than 6 months or whatever they used to recycle those tapes. From a common sense point of view an agency that requires people to keep records for 7 years for tax purposes should have an internal email retention policy at least that long. Even you can't argue this.

This isn't correct. Your tax records are a different classification of information than email. They typically aren't, nor have they ever been, held to the same retention standards. Thus the questions I was asking above. Our company's policy is around the person's inbox....you can keep up to 9 months of emails there. If you want to keep them longer than that, you create another place to keep them or back them up yourself.

The bolded is a TERRIBLE company policy, and will get the company in trouble with a judge some day. If there's one thing a judge doesn't want to see, it's an arbitrary policy in which end-users can decide for themselves how long the retention should be.

Regarding e-mails in particular, the actual policy itself is somewhat irrelevant, as long as it is written, standardized, and followed. "Standardized" could even be "six months for regular users, twelve months for executives". "End-users can copy e-mails to their local hard drive at their own discretion" is not standardized.

Not sure I understand. What's the problem with the policy? Email is a form of communication, not documentation. If it's important enough to document, it belongs in a more secure place than your inbox. I don't trust my email as far as I can throw it for those purposes. No one should.

Emails are 100% totally completely absolutely thoroughly considered "documents".

 

[SaintsInDome2006]

According to some sources the IRS did have a third party backup. And that just after the scandal broke the IRS cut ties. Maybe this is coincidence, but the timeline of "investigation started", HD crash, then just after that the email archivist was fired will definitely lead to fuel for the conspiracy fires.

Time for a special prosecutor, methinks. This is a mess and needs a disinterested third party to dig into events here.

A forensic audit would be a good place to start and no need to wait for a special prosecutor. But this definitely needs an independent set of eyes at this point.

 

[avoiding injuries]

According to some sources the IRS did have a third party backup. And that just after the scandal broke the IRS cut ties. Maybe this is coincidence, but the timeline of "investigation started", HD crash, then just after that the email archivist was fired will definitely lead to fuel for the conspiracy fires.

Time for a special prosecutor, methinks. This is a mess and needs a disinterested third party to dig into events here.

If you need a disinterested third party, the media could run the investigation.

 

[Sinrman]

Apparently my insurance company has waaaaaaaaaay better documentation and retention policies than the IRS.

Every 12 months we have to go through every document we have including email and rate the business value. and then decide where to store it and for how long. So basically emails like "Free donuts in the break room" stay for 12 months.

Anything with a temporary instruction stays for another year and anything actually involving a claim or permanent change is saved forever and buried in a time capsule or something.

I am not saying conspiracy but to be able to find nothing from 6 people in those positions of responsibility is pretty astonishing to me.

Yet the IRS expects YOU to keep 7 years worth of documents. In their eyes, you're guilty unless you can provide proof. But we're not supposed to apply the same standards of proof to them in this case.

I hope someone burns for this.

Not just "someone". The entire bloated IRS.

 

[Sand]

According to some sources the IRS did have a third party backup. And that just after the scandal broke the IRS cut ties. Maybe this is coincidence, but the timeline of "investigation started", HD crash, then just after that the email archivist was fired will definitely lead to fuel for the conspiracy fires.

Time for a special prosecutor, methinks. This is a mess and needs a disinterested third party to dig into events here.

If you need a disinterested third party, the media could run the investigation.

The media. Good one.

 

[rockaction]

When Mark Halperin has turned on you, you're not doing very well.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/06/23/halperin_on_irs_scandal_if_this_was_a_gop_admin_this_story_would_be_a_national_obsession.html

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/osw015/irs---straight-outta-incompetence

 

[SaintsInDome2006]

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/osw015/irs---straight-outta-incompetence

Watched the whole thing, great stuff.

 

[drummer]

People still upset over this?

 

[rockaction]

People still upset over this?

Yeah, it's kind of front-page news.

 

[drummer]

People still upset over this?

Yeah, it's kind of front-page news.

So your PAC was on that list?

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

People still upset over this?

Yeah, it's kind of front-page news.

So your PAC was on that list?

You think people should care only about things that affect them personally?

That would be a strange rule. Nonetheless, I think that incompetence (or worse) by the IRS has the potential to affect all of us personally. So I think people are justified in being disturbed by this issue, even if they are not associated with PACs, until the incompetence is shown to be cured.

 

[drummer]

People still upset over this?

Yeah, it's kind of front-page news.

So your PAC was on that list?

You think people should care only about things that affect them personally?

That would be a strange rule. Nonetheless, I think that gross incompetence (or worse) by the IRS has the potential to affect all of us personally. So I think people are justified in being disturbed by this issue, even if they are not associated with PACs, until the incompetence is cured.

They're PACs. Most who were trying to game the system with a tax exemption. You'd figure those who are conservative to be against anything trying to game the system. Heck the whole idea of PACs are the real problem. People should get upset over Joe Blow starting a website to get paid via a half arsed "conservative" PAC.

 

[Baloney Sandwich]

People still upset over this?

Yeah, it's kind of front-page news.

So your PAC was on that list?

You think people should care only about things

that affect them personally?

That would be a strange rule. Nonetheless, I think that gross incompetence (or worse) by the

IRS has the potential to affect all of us personally. So I think people are justified in being disturbed by this issue, even if they are not associated with PACs, until the

incompetence is cured.

They're PACs. Most who were trying to game

the system with a tax exemption. You'd figure those who are conservative to be against anything trying to game the system. Heck the whole idea of PACs are the real problem. People should get upset over Joe Blow starting a website to get paid via a half arsed

"conservative" PAC.

Yes, that totally justifies the IRS breaking the law and covering it up

 

[drummer]

People still upset over this?

Yeah, it's kind of front-page news.

So your PAC was on that list?

You think people should care only about things

that affect them personally?

That would be a strange rule. Nonetheless, I think that gross incompetence (or worse) by the

IRS has the potential to affect all of us personally. So I think people are justified in being disturbed by this issue, even if they are not associated with PACs, until the

incompetence is cured.

They're PACs. Most who were trying to game

the system with a tax exemption. You'd figure those who are conservative to be against anything trying to game the system. Heck the whole idea of PACs are the real problem. People should get upset over Joe Blow starting a website to get paid via a half arsed

"conservative" PAC.

Yes, that totally justifies the IRS breaking the law and covering it up

Which law did they break?

 

[MaxThreshold]

People still upset over this?

Yeah, it's kind of front-page news.

So your PAC was on that list?

You think people should care only about things

that affect them personally?

That would be a strange rule. Nonetheless, I think that gross incompetence (or worse) by the

IRS has the potential to affect all of us personally. So I think people are justified in being disturbed by this issue, even if they are not associated with PACs, until the

incompetence is cured.

They're PACs. Most who were trying to game

the system with a tax exemption. You'd figure those who are conservative to be against anything trying to game the system. Heck the whole idea of PACs are the real problem. People should get upset over Joe Blow starting a website to get paid via a half arsed

"conservative" PAC.

Yes, that totally justifies the IRS breaking the law and covering it up

We're they really trying to "game" the system? Was that ever proven? Or is that something made up on the spot as a smokescreen?

 

[drummer]

People still upset over this?

Yeah, it's kind of front-page news.

So your PAC was on that list?

You think people should care only about things

that affect them personally?

That would be a strange rule. Nonetheless, I think that gross incompetence (or worse) by the

IRS has the potential to affect all of us personally. So I think people are justified in being disturbed by this issue, even if they are not associated with PACs, until the

incompetence is cured.

They're PACs. Most who were trying to game

the system with a tax exemption. You'd figure those who are conservative to be against anything trying to game the system. Heck the whole idea of PACs are the real problem. People should get upset over Joe Blow starting a website to get paid via a half arsed

"conservative" PAC.

Yes, that totally justifies the IRS breaking the law and covering it up

We're they really trying to "game" the system? Was that ever proven? Or is that something made up on the spot as a smokescreen?

The PAC has to prove first that they were legitimate. Which most really weren't.

I mean, even you can start one.

 

[MaxThreshold]

People still upset over this?

Yeah, it's kind of front-page news.

So your PAC was on that list?

You think people should care only about things

that affect them personally?

That would be a strange rule. Nonetheless, I think that gross incompetence (or worse) by the

IRS has the potential to affect all of us personally. So I think people are justified in being disturbed by this issue, even if they are not associated with PACs, until the

incompetence is cured.

They're PACs. Most who were trying to game

the system with a tax exemption. You'd figure those who are conservative to be against anything trying to game the system. Heck the whole idea of PACs are the real problem. People should get upset over Joe Blow starting a website to get paid via a half arsed

"conservative" PAC.

Yes, that totally justifies the IRS breaking the law and covering it up

We're they really trying to "game" the system? Was that ever proven? Or is that something made up on the spot as a smokescreen?

The PAC has to prove first that they were legitimate. Which most really weren't.

I mean, even you can start one.

Who said they weren't?

 

[drummer]

People still upset over this?

Yeah, it's kind of front-page news.

So your PAC was on that list?

You think people should care only about things

that affect them personally?

That would be a strange rule. Nonetheless, I think that gross incompetence (or worse) by the

IRS has the potential to affect all of us personally. So I think people are justified in being disturbed by this issue, even if they are not associated with PACs, until the

incompetence is cured.

They're PACs. Most who were trying to game

the system with a tax exemption. You'd figure those who are conservative to be against anything trying to game the system. Heck the whole idea of PACs are the real problem. People should get upset over Joe Blow starting a website to get paid via a half arsed

"conservative" PAC.

Yes, that totally justifies the IRS breaking the law and covering it up

We're they really trying to "game" the system? Was that ever proven? Or is that something made up on the spot as a smokescreen?

The PAC has to prove first that they were legitimate. Which most really weren't.

I mean, even you can start one.

Who said they weren't?

Jeebus, this was covered pages ago. Where are those PACs now?

 

[MaxThreshold]

People still upset over this?

Yeah, it's kind of front-page news.

So your PAC was on that list?

You think people should care only about things

that affect them personally?

That would be a strange rule. Nonetheless, I think that gross incompetence (or worse) by the

IRS has the potential to affect all of us personally. So I think people are justified in being disturbed by this issue, even if they are not associated with PACs, until the

incompetence is cured.

They're PACs. Most who were trying to game

the system with a tax exemption. You'd figure those who are conservative to be against anything trying to game the system. Heck the whole idea of PACs are the real problem. People should get upset over Joe Blow starting a website to get paid via a half arsed

"conservative" PAC.

Yes, that totally justifies the IRS breaking the law and covering it up

We're they really trying to "game" the system? Was that ever proven? Or is that something made up on the spot as a smokescreen?

The PAC has to prove first that they were legitimate. Which most really weren't.

I mean, even you can start one.

Who said they weren't?

Jeebus, this was covered pages ago. Where are those PACs now?

Does that make them illegitimate because they may be not around now?