IRS Plays the Old Shell Game with Email Files
Sunday, June 22, 2014 at 9:39AM IRS Hid Emails on Outside Company's File Servers
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said it can't provide emails sent between 2009 and 2011 that were
requested by congressional investigators because of hard drive crashes. [Ooops!--they implied it was their hardware failure and forgot to really say that the emails were archived on hard drives of an outside media storage service company.]
The agency said that emails stored on dead drives were lost forever because its email backup tapes were recycled every six months, and employees were responsible for keeping their own long-term archives.
The IRS had a contract with email backup service vendor Sonasoft starting in 2005, according to FedSpending.org, which lists the contract as being for "automatic data processing services." Sonasoft's motto is "email archiving done right," and the company lists the IRS as a customer.
In 2009, Sonasoft even sent out a Tweet advertising its work for the IRS. [NOTE: Sonasoft misspelled the word "servers" as "severs". Maybe they had a "Freuedian Slip" and said what they were actually doing, "severing" emails from server drives.]
The extent and exact details of the service that Sonasoft provided to the IRS aren't clear. But the company advertises its email archiving solution as "ideal for small and
medium businesses, government agencies, school districts, nonprofit organizations using Microsoft’s Exchange Server." And a document posted on its website describing its services says that its system "archives all email content and so reduces the risk of non-compliance with legal, regulatory and other obligations to preserve critical business content."
Credit: Peter Suderman reason.com
