I usually don’t go down bunny holes concerning government inadequacies, but I can’t let this one go. It concerns the IRS and lost emails.

I saw a news item that key people at the IRS inexplicably experienced computer crashes that foiled attempts to recover emails concerning Tea Party targeting.

Really?

I find it incredibly interesting that a government computer can crash and cause the loss of emails. Admittedly, I’m making assumptions, but they are based on personal experience as an IT employee for a fairly large company where computer crashes were  common, though infrequent, events. When it happened it was a simple matter of replacing the hard drive, or the computer, to get the employee back in action.

True, personal files on crashed systems get lost, but corporate documents were safely captured on company servers. None of that data, or email messages, went missing.

So, knowing this, and seeing what the IRS is saying about computer crashes and lost emails, I can only presume that the IRS doesn’t follow common corporate procedures, or common practice, for protecting their data. They either work on a system that doesn’t use servers, have departments that work in silos allowing their managers to determine how data is protected, or “someone” is simply lying.

 I wonder which one it is. There’s a possibility, of course, that I’ve missed something and the IRS has expanded on more modern methods for data protection that were revealed when ENRON folded up and crashed in 2001.

Yeah … that’s probably it.