The IRS Incident: Archiving Lessons from the ‘Lost Emails’ Files

Thousands of lost emails, allegations of hidden agendas, high political tensions, and a trail of congressional investigations.

The events surrounding the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal seem like those right out of a House of Cards episode, where a sophisticated web of power, intrigue and conspiracy theories keep the observer riveted on the details and final outcome.

In this story, two years’ worth of official IRS emails required for an investigation were lost to hard drive failures. At the center of the controversy is Lois Lerner, the former commissioner for the IRS tax-exemptions division. Conservatives have accused her department of excessively scrutinizing Tea Party groups that submit applications seeking tax-exempt status. The trouble is, the IRS hasn’t produced the emails that demonstrate evidence, or lack thereof.

Messages from the time period under investigation were lost when Lerner’s hard drive crashed in 2011, along with those of several of her colleagues. The IRS attempted to retrieve the data several times, but efforts were unsuccessful. Lerner resigned from the agency, but that didn’t stop congressional probes from beginning shortly thereafter.

The Justice Department, FBI and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) continue to dig to find out what happened. Most recently, a U.S. government lawyer conceded that thousands of emails belonging to Lerner were backed up along with the computer records of all other federal employees, but that ‘it would be too hard to go and get Lois Lerner’s emails from that backup system.’

TIGTA has been formally involved in the investigation since the summer of 2012, and the IRS said it has already handed over more than a million pages of material to Congressional committees, including 27,000+ emails from Lerner’s computer account, and 18,000+ emails sent to or from her. The IRS is working to retrieve more emails, but key pieces of information may still remain missing. The conservative foundation Judicial Watch also filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to retrieve all of the missing records.

Imagine if the IRS had followed best practices for an email and records retention program, with reasonable policy, thorough employee training and technology to enforce the policy. The story might have developed differently:

The Investigation Would Be Resolved Faster. The investigation has been embarrassing and unproductive for the IRS, because the agency has had to comb through hard drives, laptops and cell phones to try and retrieve device data. It didn’t have to be that way. With sound policy, appropriate training and the right archiving technology, officials could have efficiently retrieved any email to or from IRS employees from a central, secure and tamper-proof archive.. It wouldn’t matter if an employee lost or damaged a device because messages would be stored in the archive, allowing the IRS to respond to content requests much faster and reduce the pain of a drawn-out investigation.

The Investigation Would Cost Less. In responding to congressional requests from last May, the IRS said it has incurred nearly $10 million in direct costs, with more than 250 IRS employees spending over 120,000 hours working on compliance with several investigations. The IRS also spent an additional $6-8 million to ‘optimize existing information technology systems and ensure a stable infrastructure for the production and required redactions to protect taxpayer information.’ This provides a startling example of how fulfilling investigative records requests can take thousands of employee labor hours, and result in exorbitant costs.

In comparison, costs to implement and manage an email archiving system would have been miniscule, and helped the agency during investigative requests, e-discovery processes, and legal proceedings. Rather than burying a team of employees and counsel in an avalanche of manual message retrieval from multiple email sources, a central archive could help locate the needle in the haystack to provide investigators with forensically sound email records from the time requested.

If records retention problems like this can happen to one of the country’s largest government agencies, they can happen anywhere. Put the right records retention practices into place to avoid embarrassing, damaging and costly investigations from happening in the first place!