Although I’ve never had an instance of the IRS losing mine or a client’s emails, I have had a run in with the California Board of Equalization. My client alleged to have sent several back-and-forth emails with a Board agent who gave him written, albeit, incorret advice upon which he relied. Years later I was retained to assist in reducing the tax debt and penalties. Unfortunately for my client, his business server had gone down and his IT people told him his emails were lost for good. Hoping to get lucky we filed a Public Records Act request with the Board asking or any and all emails between my client and the named agent. The Board’s ultimate response was, in essence, we wipe our email servers every two years and ask our agents to print off all emails they deem relevant for filing. Surprise, surprise, the agent in question hadn’t printed off a single email in question has he didn’t deem them to be relevant. The government records retention rules are an absolute travesty. The idea that IRS and Board employees are given discretion to decide which emails to keep and print while all electronic email records are ultimately erased and scrubbed is astounding.
When I ran across the below article from the Fort Wayne Telegram from a former “insider”, I thought it was a fascinating read. Federal Government Email From the Inside, by Richard Greene:
Since senior federal official Lois Lerner and I served together in the Bush Administration, surely she must have received the same sort of regular briefings about using the government’s email system as I did. …
I was told that anything I did with my computer or Blackberry device would result in a permanent record being created. Only classified communications would be encrypted, and all the rest would be discoverable in any legal proceedings. That record would be available to virtually anyone but especially useful to Congress or the Justice Department in the event of their need to examine electronic communications dealing with public affairs.
Any notion that I could just erase something after it had been sent was conclusively dashed when the hard drive inside my desktop computer in my office crashed. The tech guy came in, quickly removed the drive and told me he would try to fix it. I explained to him that my concern was that all my data, including email that I often searched through, was on that drive and could be lost.
His reply was to assure me that every stroke of my keyboard had been backed up multiple times in the local office and off site as well, and nothing would be lost. If he couldn’t fix the drive he had removed, he would simply set up a new one and transfer everything that was there from the moment it failed and it would be completely restored.
Maybe my experience is why the latest polls are finding about 75 percent of the American people believe Congress should keep investigating what happened to Lerner’s emails.