IRS scandal smelling like a coverup

Good day all, in the continuing scandal regarding the Internal Revenue Service, the suppression of the Conservative enemies of Obama and the missing emails, many people are detecting the aroma of a coverup.

In the last 2 weeks, it has come out that the emails for the time period the congress is looking into have mysteriously gone *POOF* and can’t be recovered. Many people, actually most people consider this to be an outright lie by the Internal Revenue Service’s managers. Here’s a recap for you. The congress demanded all communications including email sent and received by Lois Lerner. However, the IRS claimed that her email had been lost in a hard drive failure ((IRS: The dog ate our email)). This didn’t pass the smell test, and congress also demanded the email from 6 other people. Whoops! It seems there were a rash of hard drive failures and “Oh we’re sorry, but we don’t have those messages anymore ((The Dog ate a lot more emails!)).”

Then we had IRS commissioner John Koskinen basically telling Congress to shove it ((IRS to Congress, “Don’t like our answer? Tough!”)). All this has enraged the committee looking into the IRS’s suppression of the rights of the conservative and Tea Party groups and sparked calls for a special prosecutor. There have also been demands for the hard drives that appear to have been scrapped and demands for answers on why the emails from the relevant people weren’t backed up in violation of various laws and regulations.

And now we come to the aroma of Coverup.” It’s now been uncovered that the Internal Revenue Service had a contract with a company that specializes in backing up email and other documents. This company, Sonasoft, had been archiving email for the IRS since 2005. It’s contract was cancelled just weeks after Lois Lerner took a hammer to her hard drive. Here are the details from the Daily Caller:

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?”

Now this is exactly what I and many others who work in the IT field mean about being able to recover from a disk crash. Every company, no matter how small, has some means of backing up data and email and Sonasoft is just one of many companies that provide this service. It’s all part of what we call “Disaster Recovery” and being able to quickly restore systems and data is critical to keeping a business going.

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.

Now isn’t that handy? They have Lois Lerner’s incriminating email! Now we can find out just what she was up to and who she was talking to. Or can we?

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.

That aroma is starting to smell like rotten fish to me.

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.

Now you see why this all looks like a coverup. Here we have a company that is doing backups and has the missing email. Then comes the summons from Congress that they want those messages. They’ve already trashed the drive in Lerner’s computer, (Actually a very easy thing to do) and all of a sudden someone remembers the contract with Sonasoft. They quickly cancel the contract and Sonasoft would then erase the data since they no longer have any right to hold on to it. I doubt they were even aware that the inquiry by Congress had been made.

Now I’ve closed out systems and contracts like this myself in my Real World Jobs. The one thing I always did was get a full copy of the data the contractor was holding for us. It isn’t just common sense, it many cases, like a congressional summons, it’s the law. So, where are the backups that Sonasoft would have provided to the IRS when the contract was closed out? If I were David Camp, (Head of the house Ways and Means Committee), I would have one of my aids contact Sonasoft and ask them what their policy is regarding closing out contracts like the one with the IRS. Did they provide the IRS a full copy of the data they were holding? If not, why not?

I can see a very terrifying idea traveling through the Obama administration. What if Sonasoft hasn’t yet purged that data? If they have that data, I would instruct them to preserve it and get some people to their offices with a subpena first thing in the morning. If they don’t have the data, then I would ask them who they provided the backups to and how they were delivered and in what format? Then I would get that person in front of the committee and start asking some very pointed questions. I think next week is going to be rather interesting.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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