The dog ate the IRS's homework.

[dismal]

Allow me to remind the factually challenged and the forgetful there was an inspector general's report on this:

The IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions instead of indications of potential political campaign intervention. Ineffective management: 1) allowed inappropriate criteria to be developed and stay in place for more than 18 months, 2) resulted in substantial delays in processing certain applications, and 3) allowed unnecessary information requests to be issued. Although the processing of some applications with potential significant political campaign intervention was started soon after receipt, no work was completed on the majority of these applications for 13 months.... For the 296 total political campaign intervention applications [reviewed in the audit] as of December 17, 2012, 108 had been approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 were open from 206 to 1,138 calendar days (some for more than three years and crossing two election cycles).... Many organizations received requests for additional information from the IRS that included unnecessary, burdensome questions (e.g., lists of past and future donors).

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Yes. But it also depends on what she was deleting and how much she saved and if she saved it all too. It was a very stupid policy of the IRS to have the employees keep track of their emails.

I don't think it was a policy. Rather, it happened because some beancounter skimped on mailbox space.

Except it was policy of, keep the email you need to keep on your own workstation and not have it be backed up for years. I'm not saying it's only a problem at the IRS. I do think this is an issue with a lot of companies.

I disagree.

It was what actually happened given the limits they were working with, that doesn't make it a policy.

 

[dismal]

Yes. But it also depends on what she was deleting and how much she saved and if she saved it all too. It was a very stupid policy of the IRS to have the employees keep track of their emails.

I don't think it was a policy. Rather, it happened because some beancounter skimped on mailbox space.

Except it was policy of, keep the email you need to keep on your own workstation and not have it be backed up for years. I'm not saying it's only a problem at the IRS. I do think this is an issue with a lot of companies.

I disagree.

It was what actually happened given the limits they were working with, that doesn't make it a policy.

Yeah, the policy was that all records had to be preserved.

Or, the law was anyway.

 

[Narapoia]

The IRS is broadly part of "the Obama Administration". The question would be did it reach "the White House".

There is evidence that there were frequent contacts (30 visits, IIRC) between one of the people (Nikole Flax) whose emails were destroyed in one of the seven "accidental" hard drive crashes and the White House.

I understand that the IRS falls under the executive branch. In my mind though I wouldn't necessarily classify unelected bureaucrats as part of an elected administration. That might be due to being someone looking at the US system from the outside though.

Agreement on your question regarding the White House. I am sufficiently disillusioned with the way Obama has turned out that it no longer seems outrageous that 'The White House' was involved. I don't think that the visits are indicative of collusion though unless they are an aberration in the usual pattern of tax official visits to the WH. Is it unusual for this person or someone in her position to make such visits? If yes then I will certainly take more notice, otherwise it is just a number resulting from business as usual.

 

[Horatio Parker]

I don't think that the visits are indicative of collusion though unless they are an aberration in the usual pattern of tax official visits to the WH. Is it unusual for this person or someone in her position to make such visits? If yes then I will certainly take more notice, otherwise it is just a number resulting from business as usual.

The visits were part of planning for the Obamacare rollout, which makes extensive use of tax credits.

I saw somewhere that Flax's emails were not lost because they had been backed up to another computer. I can't find that again to link to it so YMMV.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Yes. But it also depends on what she was deleting and how much she saved and if she saved it all too. It was a very stupid policy of the IRS to have the employees keep track of their emails.

I don't think it was a policy. Rather, it happened because some beancounter skimped on mailbox space.

Except it was policy of, keep the email you need to keep on your own workstation and not have it be backed up for years. I'm not saying it's only a problem at the IRS. I do think this is an issue with a lot of companies.

I disagree.

It was what actually happened given the limits they were working with, that doesn't make it a policy.

Yeah, the policy was that all records had to be preserved.

Or, the law was anyway.

Yeah, the law says they are to be preserved. That doesn't mean they were given the resources to actually carry out the law. Blame the people who didn't give them the resources, not the victims asked to do the impossible.

 

[coloradoatheist]

Yes. But it also depends on what she was deleting and how much she saved and if she saved it all too. It was a very stupid policy of the IRS to have the employees keep track of their emails.

I don't think it was a policy. Rather, it happened because some beancounter skimped on mailbox space.

Except it was policy of, keep the email you need to keep on your own workstation and not have it be backed up for years. I'm not saying it's only a problem at the IRS. I do think this is an issue with a lot of companies.

I disagree.

It was what actually happened given the limits they were working with, that doesn't make it a policy.

Yeah, the policy was that all records had to be preserved.

Or, the law was anyway.

Yeah, the law says they are to be preserved. That doesn't mean they were given the resources to actually carry out the law. Blame the people who didn't give them the resources, not the victims asked to do the impossible.

Except not quite. The problem would be the policy and not the resources. All email systems have limits so eventually a person would have to store the emails somewhere else. So the question would be the policy to save emails, where, how to back them up, and what to do in case of the deletion and what the process is to try and save them. I actually think this is one case where they burden an individual too much to know the law and it should the company/institution responsibility to preserver all the documentation to the best of their ability.

I would only hold her in contempt as a user if she knowingly destroyed the files.

 

[maxparrish]

And now we have Senator Grassley being targeted by Ms. Lerner...

 

[maxparrish]

If you have some facts or evidence you think is better than the poll I cited please produce it.

i have cited facts and evidence numerous times in this thread, and a half-blind poodle with a dead sparrow in its mouth and an old cooking pot on its head that is howling itself deaf while being whacked in the knackers with a woodsman axe is "better evidence" than any single thing you've posted in this thread, so you might want to see about checking whether or not that smug has any remotely valid justification.

there are 3 very simple and unassailable facts in evidence in this case:
1. all types of political groups were targeted for extra scrutiny, and only progressive/liberal groups were actually denied tax exempt status, so this isn't some anti-conservative conspiracy like you're trying to pretend it is.
2. there is no reasonable or valid evidence to support an assertion that either A. these emails "should" have been archived in the first place or that B. the lost emails were the result of malicious intent.
3. so far as i know, nobody and nothing in this case has broken any laws or violated any policy or code of conduct - extra scrutiny to 501c4 applications is within the authority of the IRS, the only thing in question here is the criteria by which certain persons picked groups for review.

as much as some people of a certain ideological bent desperately want this whole thing to be about a cigar-chomping commie nigger coming after them to take their guns and white women away, so that you can validate their paranoia and emotional over-reaction to basically everything, the purely objective facts is that this is nothing, founded on nothing, which harmed nobody.

as usual, your partisan blinders make you incapable of seeing the actual point.
you were trying to use a viewership poll to somehow magically validate this smoke-and-mirrors bullshit "scandal" that you've got such a raging boner for - THAT is what is so funny and pathetic, not that it was by right-wingers, of right-wingers, to prove that the opinions of right-wingers reinforce the views of right-wingers... though that part is sad and tragic in-and-of-itself as well.

Earlier in this thread you made a plea to look at this issue through a dispassionate and non-partisan prism; given your escalating polemics, has that ship has left the dock? All of us tend to interpret reality through our filters but it only becomes unreasonable when such views are irrational, when fear of the truth renders a person unable to deal with reality. Your frustration, even if it were warranted, that leads to anger over "pathetic right-wingers" and "smoke-and mirrors bullshit", or accusing a poster of having a raging boner is not going to lead oneself to truth.

So rather than either of us rigidly defending (or attacking) the IRS (at this moment) and adopting an inflexible or intentionally arrested line facts, why not rechannel our feelings into a passion for at least knowing and accepting the full facts before we cast judgement?

So to begin lets take a second look at those "unassailable" and "simple" facts you provided:


"1. all types of political groups were targeted for extra scrutiny, and only progressive/liberal groups were actually denied tax exempt status, so this isn't some anti-conservative conspiracy like you're trying to pretend it is."

However you arrived at that assertion, it is pretty certain to be wrong. While there are many articles and sources that contradict your belief, I will extensively cite one that illustrates why this "unassailable" fact is a fiction:

IRS scoreboard: 100 percent of “targeted” liberal groups were approved, conservatives languished
POSTED AT 12:26 PM ON AUGUST 1, 2013 BY GUY BENSON

Granted, virtually everyone understands the broad strokes of what happened at the IRS over the last few years, yet Democrats keep dredging up false equivalencies — so it’s useful to trumpet additional data like this. Via NPR:

A House Ways and Means Committee staff analysis of the applications of 111 conservative and progressive groups applying for tax exempt status found conservative applicants faced, “more questions, more denials, more delays,” says committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich. That is, when the IRS sent groups letters asking for further information, conservative groups were asked more questions — on average, three times more. All of the groups with “progressive” in their name were ultimately approved, while only 46 percent of conservative groups won approval. Others are still waiting for an answer or gave up.
Right-leaning groups were asked triple the number of questions (like this, and this), and ended up getting shot down more than half the time. Lefty organizations skated by with fewer inquiries and were all approved. Let’s examine the raw numbers:

To recap: Conservatives won the “who got scrutinized” category 104-7, the “who got rejected” column 54 percent to zero, and the “still in limbo or gave up” tally 56-0. Indeed, as this controversy unfolded, a USA Today analysis determined that over a 27-month period, not a single Tea Party tax-exempt application was given the green light, while “dozens” of liberal applicants were rubber-stamped. The “both sides were targeted, and Issa lied!” crowd can huff and puff all they want, but they can’t change these facts. There’s also the tiny details that (a) the IRS conducted its own internal investigation prior to the IG audit, and reached very similar conclusions, which (b) is why they admitted to and apologized for the improper targeting of conservatives. Meanwhile, the leaders of several established right-leaning groups are now alleging that the IRS abruptly began challenging their previously-granted tax statuses during this same time frame, thus forcing their organizations to divert significant resources to legal fees. Chairman Issa has asked the Inspector General to broaden his probe to include these new accusations. Ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings — who went from being “outraged” at the IRS, to declaring the issue “solved,” to demanding further investigations — has objected to Issa’s request. Has Cummings re-embraced his “problem solved” posture

http://hotair.com/greenroom/archive...pproved-just-46-percent-of-conservative-orgs/

This article, using information supplied by NPR and USA Today, demonstrates that your first "fact" is wrong - that progressive groups were all approved vs. delayed and partial approval for conservative (Tea Party) groups.

So, let us accept that as a given.



If you made your assertion based on something you read, feel free to provide a link.

When I have time, I will also look at your other two claims...

 

[prideandfall]

Earlier in this thread you made a plea to look at this issue through a dispassionate and non-partisan prism; given your escalating polemics, has that ship has left the dock?

my escalating polemics are in response to the rampant stupidity being displayed by people in this thread, not in response to the situation itself.

All of us tend to interpret reality through our filters but it only becomes unreasonable when such views are irrational, when fear of the truth renders a person unable to deal with reality. Your frustration, even if it were warranted, that leads to anger over "pathetic right-wingers" and "smoke-and mirrors bullshit", or accusing a poster of having a raging boner is not going to lead oneself to truth.

true, but it's also not an argument in-and-of-itself, so that's fair.

However you arrived at that assertion, it is pretty certain to be wrong. While there are many articles and sources that contradict your belief, I will extensively cite one that illustrates why this "unassailable" fact is a fiction:

so this is where blinders start becoming a real big problem.
you cited a decidedly right-wing website posting of an article from almost a year ago that posted a certain set of figures.
here is what i think to be a fairly neutral article from the same time period saying more or less exactly the opposite of your link: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...e-irs-didnt-target-just-conservatives/276536/
here is a decidedly left-wing website posting an article from 2 months ago that is posting a set of figures that directly contradict what you posted:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/04/23/3429722/irs-records-tea-party/

This article, using information supplied by NPR and USA Today, demonstrates that your first "fact" is wrong - that progressive groups were all approved vs. delayed and partial approval for conservative (Tea Party) groups.

the article is from august of 2013, citing articles from march to may of 2013, when basically everyone was flipping out about the very idea of the 'scandal' and before anybody had many facts from congressional hearings - and even then, it's been reported that the people who were tasked with auditing the IRS records to find out the true scope of the issue were specifically told by darrel issa to "narrow focus on tea party groups" when searching for cases on increased scrutiny.

the bottom line is that compiling tid-bits from the various sources across the last year leads to the conclusion that during a particular vicious political cycle, new requests for tax exempt status from ideological groups received extra scrutiny - more of them were right-leaning groups than left-leaning (whether it be simply due to volume or whether it be due to disproportionate selection is not clear), and while the actions involved in this business were not in line with IRS policy, none of it was illegal.
the correct response here should be: find out who knew what, punish (by whatever means it seems reasonable) those in the higher positions of authority who knew about the issue, take whatever steps necessary to stop this sort of thing from happening again, and offer to expedite the review of any groups still pending.
the incorrect response (and the one i'm haranguing people about) is to go ape shit about this being a presidental level conspiracy theory to sabotage america.

 

[dismal]

You know what's weird?

Lois Lerner, aka the head of the group at the center of all this, came out an publicly apologized for inappropriately targeting conservative groups.

It's odd that she would do that if she wasn't doing it.

I guess she's some sort of crazed liar.

 

[prideandfall]

You know what's weird?

Lois Lerner, aka the head of the group at the center of all this, came out an publicly apologized for inappropriately targeting conservative groups.

It's odd that she would do that if she wasn't doing it.

I guess she's some sort of crazed liar.

who's ever said they didn't do it?

 

[pegasus8]

The IRS Scandal, reg TM, is just another example of Obama being worst then Hitler.

Wow! We see far right neo-con groups who want to disband the IRS and then they are targeted by the IRS.
Gee who would have thought? Oops too bad that the IRS targeted liberal progressive groups also.
But then I guess this does not fit the Faux Noise narrative.

Peace

Pegasus

 

[Horatio Parker]

Wow! We see far right neo-con groups who want to disband the IRS and then they are targeted by the IRS.
Gee who would have thought? Oops too bad that the IRS targeted liberal progressive groups also.
But then I guess this does not fit the Faux Noise narrative.

Peace

Pegasus

I'm waiting to for someone call for outsourcing tax collection.

 

[Nexus]

They outsourced delinquent taxes to private collections 10 years ago. The program was a failure but they're going to try again soon. Here's a link from back then you can google more for why it was a failure and restarting the program.

link

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Except not quite. The problem would be the policy and not the resources. All email systems have limits so eventually a person would have to store the emails somewhere else. So the question would be the policy to save emails, where, how to back them up, and what to do in case of the deletion and what the process is to try and save them. I actually think this is one case where they burden an individual too much to know the law and it should the company/institution responsibility to preserver all the documentation to the best of their ability.

I would only hold her in contempt as a user if she knowingly destroyed the files.

You're assuming the people who backed up the mail server were given the resources to maintain the vast store of backup tapes that would be needed--and a system to restore them onto to recopy them onto more modern equipment. It's not like most records where you can just stick the old stuff in a box somewhere.

 

[maxparrish]

my escalating polemics are in response to the rampant stupidity being displayed by people in this thread, not in response to the situation itself.

All of us tend to interpret reality through our filters but it only becomes unreasonable when such views are irrational, when fear of the truth renders a person unable to deal with reality. Your frustration, even if it were warranted, that leads to anger over "pathetic right-wingers" and "smoke-and mirrors bullshit", or accusing a poster of having a raging boner is not going to lead oneself to truth.

true, but it's also not an argument in-and-of-itself, so that's fair.

However you arrived at that assertion, it is pretty certain to be wrong. While there are many articles and sources that contradict your belief, I will extensively cite one that illustrates why this "unassailable" fact is a fiction:

so this is where blinders start becoming a real big problem.
you cited a decidedly right-wing website posting of an article from almost a year ago that posted a certain set of figures.
here is what i think to be a fairly neutral article from the same time period saying more or less exactly the opposite of your link: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...e-irs-didnt-target-just-conservatives/276536/
here is a decidedly left-wing website posting an article from 2 months ago that is posting a set of figures that directly contradict what you posted:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/04/23/3429722/irs-records-tea-party/
]http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/irs_foia-65.jpg

This article, using information supplied by NPR and USA Today, demonstrates that your first "fact" is wrong - that progressive groups were all approved vs. delayed and partial approval for conservative (Tea Party) groups.

the article is from august of 2013, citing articles from march to may of 2013, when basically everyone was flipping out about the very idea of the 'scandal' and before anybody had many facts from congressional hearings - and even then, it's been reported that the people who were tasked with auditing the IRS records to find out the true scope of the issue were specifically told by darrel issa to "narrow focus on tea party groups" when searching for cases on increased scrutiny.

the bottom line is that compiling tid-bits from the various sources across the last year leads to the conclusion that during a particular vicious political cycle, new requests for tax exempt status from ideological groups received extra scrutiny - more of them were right-leaning groups than left-leaning (whether it be simply due to volume or whether it be due to disproportionate selection is not clear), and while the actions involved in this business were not in line with IRS policy, none of it was illegal.
the correct response here should be: find out who knew what, punish (by whatever means it seems reasonable) those in the higher positions of authority who knew about the issue, take whatever steps necessary to stop this sort of thing from happening again, and offer to expedite the review of any groups still pending.
the incorrect response (and the one i'm haranguing people about) is to go ape shit about this being a presidental level conspiracy theory to sabotage america.

Your links were of some interest, but these two short articles don't reconcile with or explain much in regard to the analysis's of NPR (et al.), IRS documents, or the already confessional testimony of IRS agents to the targeting. Thinkprogress and the Atlantic author seem more interested in an ginning an opaque numerology using their own individual (non-reconciling) idiosyncratic tabulations, but without offering far more detail... and besides, when it comes to the point that Lerner (et. al.) confesses inappropriate targeting of Tea Party groups by IRS staff (but not of all other groups) in 2010 to at least mid 2011, it is obvious that Lerner and others understand their own agencies are guilty (even if they blame another office). That sinks Thinkprogress spinners trying to convince us that nothing was amiss. (Yes I quoted Hot Air, but their article echoed far more objective findings of USA today and NPR analysis, unlike the inhouse Thinkprogress faithful).

Be reminded the issue is not who was selected for scrutiny BUT who was "targeted", i.e., who was selected for no other reason than their political view and how were they scrutinized, and how they were treated compared to others. The overwhelming amount of evidence of IRS targeting of Tea Party groups and their disparate treatment is far closer to unassailable than a dubious bar chart from inhouse Thinkprogress or an outdated Atlantic article with a unique pie chart (the NPR analysis was after the Atlantic article).

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has issued several reports, one of which directly addresses this targeting. The 45 page report is not 'a tidbit', it makes wide ranging and far stronger case for political targeting and, to my mind, is a nearly conclusive. NOTE it addresses BOLO lists and why groups are fairly, or unfairly, scrutinized.

In the immediate aftermath of Lois Lerner’s public apology for the targeting of conservative tax-exempt applicants, President Obama and congressional Democrats quickly
denounced the IRS misconduct.1 But later, some of the same voices that initially decried the targeting changed their tune. Less than a month after the wrongdoing was exposed, prominent
Democrats declared the “case is solved” and, later, the whole incident to be a “phony scandal.”2 ...

To support this false narrative, the Administration and congressional Democrats have seized upon the notion that the IRS’s targeting was not just limited to conservative applicants.
Time and again, they have claimed that the IRS targeted liberal- and progressive-oriented groups as well – and that, therefore, there was no political animus to the IRS’s actions.4 These
Democratic claims are flat-out wrong and have no basis in any thorough examination of the facts. ...

The Committee’s investigation demonstrates that the IRS engaged in disparate treatment of conservative-oriented tax-exempt applicants. Documents produced to the Committee show
that initial applications transferred from Cincinnati to Washington were filed by Tea Party groups. Other documents and testimony show that the initial criteria used to identify and hold
Tea Party applications captured conservative organizations. After the criteria were broadened in July 2012 to be cosmetically neutral, material provided to the Committee indicates that the IRS
still intended to target only conservative applications.

A central plank in the Democratic argument is the claim that liberal-leaning groups were identified on versions of the IRS’s “Be on the Look Out” (BOLO) lists.5 This claim ignores significant differences in the placement of the conservative and liberal entries on the BOLO lists and how the IRS used the BOLO lists in practice. The Democratic claims are further undercut by testimony from IRS employees who told the Committee that liberal groups were not subject to the same systematic scrutiny and delay as conservative organizations.6

The IRS’s independent watchdog, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), confirms that the IRS treated conservative applicants differently from liberal groups. The inspector general, J. Russell George, wrote that while TIGTA found indications that the IRS had improperly identified Tea Party groups, it “did not find evidence that the criteria [Democrats] identified, labeled ‘Progressives,’ were used by the IRS to select potential political cases during the 2010 to 2012 timeframe we audited.”7 He concluded that TIGTA “found no indication in any of these other materials that ‘Progressives’ was a term used to refer cases for scrutiny for political campaign intervention.”8

An analysis performed by the House Committee on Ways and Means buttresses the Committee’s findings of disparate treatment. The Ways and Means Committee’s review of the confidential tax-exempt applications proves that the IRS systematically targeted conservative organizations. Although a small number of progressive and liberal groups were caught up in the application backlog, the Ways and Means Committee’s review shows that the backlog was 83 percent conservative and only 10 percent were liberal-oriented.9 Moreover, the IRS approved 70 percent of the liberal-leaning groups and only 45 percent of the conservative groups.10 The IRS approved every group with the word “progressive” in its name.11 In addition, other publicly available information supports the analysis of the Ways and Means Committee. In September 2013, USA Today published an independent analysis of a list of about 160 applications in the IRS backlog.12 This analysis showed that 80 percent of the applications in the backlog were filed by conservative groups while less than seven percent were filed by liberal groups.13 A separate assessment from USA Today in May 2013 showed that for 27 months beginning in February 2010, the IRS did not approve a single tax-exempt application filed by a Tea Party group.14 During that same period, the IRS approved “perhaps dozens of applications from similar liberal and progressive groups.”15

The IRS, over many years, has undoubtedly scrutinized organizations that embrace different political views for varying reasons – in many cases, a just and neutral criteria may have been fairly utilized. This includes the time period when Tea Party organizations were systematically screened for enhanced and inappropriate scrutiny. But the concept of targeting, when defined as a systematic effort to select applicants for scrutiny simply because their applications reflected the organizations’ political views, only applied to Tea Party and similar conservative organizations. While use of term “targeting” in the IRS scandal may not always follow this definition, the reality remains that there is simply no evidence that any liberal or progressive group received enhanced scrutiny because its application reflected the organization’s political views.

For months, the Administration and congressional Democrats have attempted to downplay the IRS’s misconduct. First, the Administration sought to minimize the fallout by preemptively acknowledging the misconduct in response to a planted question at an obscure Friday morning tax-law conference. When that strategy failed, the Administration shifted to blaming “rogue agents” and “line-level” employees for the targeting. When those assertions
proved false, congressional Democrats baselessly attacked the character and integrity of the inspector general. Their attempt to allege bipartisan targeting is just another effort to distract from the fact that the Obama IRS systematically targeted and delayed conservative tax-exempt applicants.

Findings
• The IRS treated Tea Party applications distinctly different from other tax-exempt
applications.

• The IRS selectively prioritized and produced documents to the Committee to support
misleading claims about bipartisan targeting.

• Democratic Members of Congress, including Ranking Member Elijah Cummings,
Ranking Member Sander Levin, and Representative Gerry Connolly, made misleading
claims that the IRS targeted liberal-oriented groups based on documents selectively
produced by the IRS.

• The IRS’s “test” cases transferred from Cincinnati to Washington were exclusively filed
by Tea Party applicants: the Prescott Tea Party, the American Junto, and the Albuquerque
Tea Party.

• The IRS’s initial screening criteria captured exclusively Tea Party applications.

• Even after Lois Lerner broadened the screening criteria to maintain a veneer of
objectivity, the IRS still sought to target and scrutinize Tea Party applications.

• The IRS targeting captured predominantly conservative-oriented applications for taxexempt
status.

• Myth: IRS “Be on the Lookout” (BOLO) entries for liberal groups meant that the IRS
targeted liberal and progressive groups. Fact: Only Tea Party groups on the BOLO list
experienced systematic scrutiny and delay.

• Myth: The IRS targeted “progressive” groups in a similar manner to Tea Party
applicants. Fact: The IRS treated “progressive” groups differently than Tea Party
applicants. Only seven applications in the IRS backlog contained the word
“progressive,” all of which were approved by the IRS. The IRS processed progressive
applications like any other tax-exempt application.

• Myth: The IRS targeted ACORN successor groups in a similar manner to Tea Party
applicants. Fact: The IRS treated ACORN successor groups differently than Tea Party
applicants. ACORN successor groups were not subject to a “sensitive case report” or
reviewed by the IRS Chief Counsel’s office. The central issue for the ACORN successor
groups was whether the groups were legitimate new entities or part of an “abusive”
scheme to continue an old entity under a new name.

• Myth: The IRS targeted Emerge affiliate groups in a similar manner to Tea Party
applicants. Fact: The IRS treated Emerge affiliate groups differently than Tea Party
5
applicants. Emerge applications were not subjected to secondary screening like the Tea
Party cases. The central issue in the Emerge applications was private benefit, not
political speech.

• Myth: The IRS targeted Occupy groups in a similar manner to Tea Party applicants.
Fact: The IRS treated Occupy groups differently than Tea Party applicants. No
applications in the IRS backlog contained the words “Occupy.” IRS employees testified
that they were not even aware of an Occupy entry on the BOLO list.

I encourage you to read the report, and note the extensive footnotes regarding IRS agent testimony, analysis, and cited IRS documents than confirm each of these points. So until Thinkprogess decides to do more than mine an opaque and mostly redacted Bolo list with a simplistic bar chart that glosses over dates, process, and action, a reasonable person would have to give the nod to a clearly laid out case that cites many sources and evidence.

http://oversight.house.gov/report/s...democrats-misled-america-disparate-treatment/

 

[maxparrish]

PRIDEANDFALL: "... there is no reasonable or valid evidence to support an assertion that either A. these emails "should" have been archived in the first place or that B. the lost emails were the result of malicious intent."

This is hardly unassailable, nor is it that simple:

The U.S. Archivist told lawmakers on Tuesday that the IRS “did not follow the law” when it failed to report the lost Lois Lerner’s emails, which could have included official documents.
During a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing David Ferriero stopped short of saying the tax-collecting agency “broke” the law, saying “I am not a lawyer.”

But when pressed by Michigan Republican Tim Walberg about whether the IRS failure to inform the National Archives when it learned that two years of the former head of the tax exempt division’s email were lost, he said: “They did not follow the law.”...

Given Lerner’s position as head of the department at the IRS, it’s likely many of her emails were official documents since she would theoretically have discussed IRS policies, decisions and operations, suggested Paul Wester, chief records officer for the U.S. government at the hearing.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/irs-lost-emails-archivist-108242.html#ixzz35wqxvDtc

The Federal Records Act applies to email records just as it does to records you create using other media. Emails are records when they are:

-Created or received in the transaction of agency business

-Appropriate for preservation as evidence of the government’s function and activities, or

-Valuable because of the information they contain.

If you create or receive email messages during the course of your daily work, you are responsible for ensuring that you manage them properly. The Treasury Department’s current email policy requires emails and attachments that meet the definition of a federal record be added to the organization’s files by printing them (including the essential transmission data) and filing them with related paper records. If transmission and receipt data are not printed by the email system, annotate the paper copy. More information on IRS records management requirements is available at http://erc.web.irs.gov/Displayanswers/Question.asp?FolderID=4&CategoryID=5 or see the Records Management Handbook, IRM 1.15.1 http://publish.no.irs.gov/IRM/P01/PDF/31421A03.PDF).

http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html

A little something extra on The Mysterious Case of Lois Lerner’s Hard Drive. There seem to be two different IRS regs governing e-mails. The Daily Caller already flagged one of them, “Emails as Possible Federal Records,” section

1.10.3.2.3. Subsection 3 states in part:

If you create or receive email messages during the course of your daily work, you are responsible for ensuring that you manage them properly. The Treasury Department’s current email policy requires emails and attachments that meet the definition of a federal record be added to the organization’s files by printing them (including the essential transmission data) and filing them with related paper records. If transmission and receipt data are not printed by the email system, annotate the paper copy.

If your e-mail’s a federal record, you’re supposed to print it and add it to the file. What’s a “federal record”? The same section defines it, and does so broadly: Any e-mail “created or received in the transaction of agency business” qualifies, which means, in theory, any message sent or received by Lois Lerner about scrutinizing tea-party groups should have been printed by her at some point and the hard copy sent for storage in the relevant file. Think she bothered to do that? ...

Why would an agency that emphasizes redundancy in record-keeping rely on a process this half-assed? Not only is there no automatic permanent storage of all e-mail, the simple act of archiving a message would remove it from the IRS’s system entirely, including the “back-up system” that preserves messages for six months before deleting them. That’s a ridiculously decentralized system for an age when storage is cheaper than it’s ever been. In fact, the former IRS IT expert whom Bryan Preston interviewed claimed that the IRS has plenty of “back-up tapes” that could be used to preserve e-mails for much longer than six months if need be. What you’ve got here, in other words, is an agency stressing record-keeping in its own regulations and then doing everything it can to undermine that redundancy, first by trusting employees to diligently file “federal records” that might incriminate them and then allowing them to remove evidence from the system altogether, which naturally led to a spate of mysterious “computer crashes” in this case. It’s goofy. But it sure came in handy, didn’t it?

Dr. Barbara Rembiesa, president of IAITAM, questions whether there is documentation of the destruction of the files. Who performed the work, says Rembiesa, is important because not all IT professionals are IAITAM certified.

“The notion that these emails just magically vanished makes no sense whatsoever. That is not how IT asset management at major businesses and government institutions works in this country. When the hard drive in question was destroyed, the IRS should have called in an accredited IT Asset Destruction (ITAD) professional or firm to complete that process, which requires extensive documentation, official signoffs, approvals, and signatures of completion. If this was done, there would be records. If this was not done, this is the smoking gun that proves the drive or drives were destroyed improperly – or not at all.”

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs...her-lerners-emails-were-destroyed_795759.html

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed.

The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” Sonasoft in 2009 tweeted, “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”

Sonasoft was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.

But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right.

Sonasoft’s fiscal year 2011 contract with the IRS ended on August 31, 2011. Eight days later, the IRS officially closed out its relationship with Sonasoft in accordance with the federal government’s contract close-out guidelines, which require agencies to fully audit their contracts and to get back any money that wasn’t used by the contractor. Curiously, the IRS de-allocated 36 cents when it closed out its contract with Sonasoft on September 8, 2011.

Lois Lerner’s computer allegedly crashed in June 2011, just ten days after House Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Dave Camp first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was engaging in targeting of nonprofit groups. Two months later, Sonasoft’s contract ended and the IRS gave its email-archiving contractor the boot.

IRS official and frequent White House visitor Nikole Flax allegedly suffered her own computer crash in December 2011, three months after the IRS ended its relationship with Sonasoft.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/22/i...s-after-lerners-computer-crash/#ixzz35xEgzYKn

And:

. The IRS was under a legal obligation to retain the information because of a litigation hold.

In 2009 a pro-Israel group called Z Street applied to the IRS for tax-exempt status. When the process was delayed, an IRS agent told the group that its application was undergoing special review because "these cases are being sent to a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization's activities contradict the Administration's public policies." In August 2010 Z Street sued the IRS on grounds that this selective processing of its application amounted to viewpoint discrimination.

Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and legal precedent, once the suit was filed the IRS was required to preserve all evidence relevant to the viewpoint-discrimination charge. That means that no matter what dog ate Lois Lerner's hard drive or what the IRS habit was of recycling the tapes used to back up its email records of taxpayer information, it had a legal duty not to destroy the evidence in ongoing litigation.

In private white-collar cases, companies facing a lawsuit routinely operate under what is known as a "litigation hold," instructing employees to affirmatively retain all documents related to the potential litigation. A failure to do that and any resulting document loss amounts to what is called "willful spoliation," or deliberate destruction of evidence if any of the destroyed documents were potentially relevant to the litigation.

At the IRS, that requirement applied to all correspondence regarding Z Street, as well as to information related to the vetting of conservative groups whose applications for tax-exempt status were delayed during an election season. Instead, and incredibly, the IRS cancelled its contract with email-archiving firm Sonasoft shortly after Ms. Lerner's computer "crash" in June 2011.

In the federal District of Columbia circuit where Z Street's case is now pending, the operating legal obligation is that "negligent or reckless spoliation of evidence is an independent and actionable tort." In a 2011 case a D.C. district court also noted that "Once a party reasonably anticipates litigation, it must suspend its routine document retention/destruction policy and put in place a 'litigation hold' to ensure the preservation of relevant documents."

http://online.wsj.com/articles/irs-lost-email-jeopardy-1403653430


What would you conclude as likely in light of the above?

PS I just read a link that may explain the Sonasoft story as smoke without a fire. It is unclear why it took a while for sonosoft to report this, but: http://libertyunyielding.com/2014/0...ng-get-silicon-valleys-wannabe-obama-elected/

 

[barbos]

So, despite multiple proclamations from local IT geniuses that email loss is routine occurrence, IRS had perfectly perfect email backup and storage. They just got rid of it when shit started to hit the fan, very convenient I must say.
oh, wait, Sonasoft said they whey are not storing IRS emails.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So, despite multiple proclamations from local IT geniuses that email loss is routine occurrence, IRS had perfectly perfect email backup and storage. They just got rid of it when shit started to hit the fan, very convenient I must say.
oh, wait, Sonasoft said they whey are not storing IRS emails.

You're missing the fact that the e-mail loss is emergent behavior, not what anybody planned.

Policy: Store everything on the server, put nothing of importance on local hard drives as they are not backed up. Hard drives are for programs only. (Even in an environment with only dozens of people that's how it worked.)

Reality: The server storage was inadequate, people moved old e-mails to local storage. Local drives sometimes crashed, thus those backed-up emails were lost.

The workers were put in a catch-22.