Putting people through months and years of uncertainty and imposing extra requirements based on political persuasion is ****ing wrong.

Cool argument though. I'll remember your bull**** weak ass argument in topics like voter identification. What's the problem? They can still vote right?

Uh, no, they(people without IDs) can't still vote. That's the ****ing point. What is it with terrible voter ID analogies these days? Popping up in all sorts of threads from our more moderate/libertarian posters.

OK here is the IRS's story:
It would cost $10M to upgrade the servers to store all e-mails
They made daily backups of the servers, but were recycling the tapes every 6 months.
After May 2013 they stopped recycling and started long term storage at a cost of $200K/ year.
When the employee mailbox was full, the employee would move emails to an archive on the local machine.
The employees were supposed to be printing out the emails to meet the record keeping requirement.
Lois must not have been printing the emails, and her hard drive crashed destroying her archive.
They went machine to machine to recover her emails from other employees hard drive archives. Hence no outside emails.
-----------------------------------
Questions I have I have not been able to find the answers to.

What version of Exchange was running on the servers? if it was 2007 or newer, they are either configured wrong or the emails would still be on them in a server archive (If I understand exchange 2007 correctly) Then again they hope to finish the upgrade to windows 7 by September.

Note 8 implies she had 6103 (taxpayer) information on her home computer on her personal email account. Pretty sure that is a no-no (Doing government stuff on a personal email account dodging the record keeping requirements is what got Karl Rove in trouble)

Maybe the NSA should start backing up data for other government agencies? The idea of storing archives on local machines that are not backed up and depending on the employee to print out the emails is, well, kinda Tom Thumb IMHO


Link to PDF: http://taxprof.typepad.com/files/irs-description.pdf

That's good stuff. I believe the IRS now but do laugh at the tone of "this is hard and we are pissing away tons of money trying to comply with your bull**** request." Tax authorities do this to tax payers all day everyday with no sympathy.

They can vote if they jump through the hoops!

You know, I worked with a guy who was ex-govt IT and I do remember him saying they had the responsibility of archiving old emails when their inbox got full, which was basically on a monthly basis.

Can you prove this by supplying the deleted emails at this time?

If this is true it makes it certain they didnt do it on purpose. Thanks.

Exclusively
Social welfare

The "scandal" is that the IRS decided to enforce the law as it was written, voted, passed and signed into law by the legislative branch rather than to interpret "exclusively" to mean "mostly" and "social welfare" to mean "whatever" as it had been doing previously.

The scandal is the IRS decided to enforce the law!

Lol, wat?

If there is any incrimination of wrongdoing here (note, more than she has just admitted happened) it will be in internal emails which are unaffected. Do you think she was playing email tag with lower level employees or employees in other IRS agencies by bouncing it through the Treasury Dept or whatever?

In Ikes world founding "non profits" that attack all of the political parties positions and candidates but not directly attacking a political party makes them non partisan in nature because IKES WORLD

In Ikes' world Koch funded political ads attacking Democrats = promotion of social welfare.

No. The scandal is they did selective enforcement. They did not apply the same standards for all groups. Only groups with certain words in thier names.

Except that's not the law. Cool story though

You can't have it both ways here. Democrats did (and still do!) the exact same thing. I don't have a problem with that, and neither did the IRS. Having a bull**** issue on tax enforcement based on political affiliation is completely not ok.

FYI:
And here's the section explaining that section, lol:

I don't really feel like looking up what emails the IRS has deemed are "appropriate for preservation."

Wow, what a clever way for conservative hackers to frame the Obama admin.

They looked at progressive groups as well as tea bagger groups. In fact the only groups that got turned down for 501(c)(4) status were progressive.

Feel free to quote something else if I was incorrect.

I'll just go ahead and "quote" what the IRS actually did phil. These groups are legally allowed to act the way they are and have been.

Good to see you realise I was correct and now just shifted the goalposts from "what the law is" to "how the law is unilaterally implemented" thanks to the IRS defining exclusively to mean primarily.

Awesome show son, good contribution to the thread as per usual.

No phil. I'm saying that you're some dude, and the IRS's enforcement of the law is done by people who know a lot more about the law than you.

No such thing. Clearly the neocons hired 13 year old Russian hackers, since conservatives have such a man-crush on Putin

It actually would be a bit of a scandal if the IRS decided to ignore long-standing regulations and revenue rulings because they didn't like them.

Initially few even noticed but once they did and because there is a vested interest for at least one of the two parties to continue the status quo it went nowhere when a couple of Dems on the committee dealing with the IRS hearing tried to get the ball rolling.

Basically after the law was passed the IRS unilaterally changed what it meant from what legislators wrote.

These groups likely don't even meet the "primarily" definition. But again, just amazing that we're re-litigating the very core issue again years down the fact. Really shows how serious and damaging a scandal this was and is. I definitely expect attack ads in 2014 to focus on weeping Tea Party leaders complaining about how filling out that 18 page questionnaire really cut into the time they needed to make "Don't Re-Nig" bumper stickers.