How dumb do they think we are?

[rjohnson]

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/06 ... ng-emails/

Ok so basically every organization in the world keeps their emails stored on a server and older emails archived there as well for years and years. But our IRS lets each user's email be stored on a non-backed up workstation and they go "poof" if it dies????? If this doesn't scream coverup I don't know what does. Nothing they are saying makes any sense.

[teul2]

So many holes in that story. I can still get data off a crashed "drive", or I know a few services that can.
And how in the world does the IRS have 6 crashed drives, all of sequestered individuals, in such a short time. I haven't had 6 drive crashes in the last 2 years.
They also need to clarify "crashed drive". Did the computer have issues and is non-bootable, or has the actual drive in the computer become unresponsive / unreadable?

[edub20]

Tuel2, Y'all must not use HP as a vendor...They need to talk to the desktop support, I'm sure they don't pay them enough to do a cover up on being told to destroy.

not to mention it was probably an SSD since the government loves to spend our money... Those things are easy to recover data from baring electronic shock to fry the chips and RARELY go bad.

[cwink]

Agreed, they are hiding information, they are just banking on the fact that most people not in the tech world believe the data is gone.. Anyone with any IT experience can see it is a bunch of BS.

[jacksbuddy]

Not only is it a load of BS, but it is also highly illegal. Aren't they required by their own laws and regulations to keep that information for a specified period of time?

[dukluk]

Brought to you by the same bunch of azzholes who require you to have every piece of documentation for the past seven years, if you get audited....did I mention, they are a bunch of azzholes???

[rjohnson]

Today an article says their equipment is so "outdated" that the IRS had over 2000 hard drive crashes last year alone. They have roughly 95000 employees. That is roughly a 2% failure rate assuming 1 to 1 ratio and not counting server equipment. The average failure rate of hard drives is 2-4%. So apparently there stuff isn't that outdated except for a reliable backup of email. Sadly most of America will believe what the IRS spews out.

[sevenhead]

^^^ Actually I saw a poll this morning that stated something like over 70% of americans (blues & reds) thought the IRS had done something illegal. I'll try and find it again if I can (it was a news poll so I'm not sure how accurate that was) Surprised the heck out of me.

[dukhntn]

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/06/150307- ... er-emails/

[davidees]

[rjohnson]

Oh this keeps getting better. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/06 ... er-emails/

"According to the IRS, agency employees typically have an email limit of 500 megabytes, or roughly 6,000 emails. It was lower than that at the time of Lerner¹s computer crash.

To deal with these limits, employees are supposed to move anything that qualifies as "official records" onto their own hard drive, and even print them out, when they¹re freeing up space. But if the hard drive goes down, files can be lost."

Ok I call bullcrap on a 500MB limit. I would venture to guess the higher ups in the IRS have no limit on email storage. And archiving the older ones to their personal workstations is the absolutely worst way to archive. And if the agents are getting supporting documents emailed to them from taxpayers 500MB would be filled up in less than a week in most cases. That would mean those poor saps working there are spending half their day managing their email quotas. The amount of dumbassedry in the government is mind blowing. That is the poorest email policy you can imagine aside from storing all of the emails on the workstations.

[Northbigmuddy]

The amount of dumbassedry in the government is mind blowing.

Dumbassedry...I will be borrowing this jewel in the future. Thanks.

[ufgators68]

It is amazing to me that all of those hard drives are damaged to the point that nothing could be recovered. I have been working on computers for 11 years and have had 3, that I can remember, that I was not able to recover data from. 2 were the result of lightning strikes and one was an old server that just died. Even tried a recovery company for that one... with negative results.