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?”
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.
Well, this would prevent any pesky archival of emails flying around after Congress started its investigation.
Sounds like the IRS was covering its tracks. No evidence, complete deniability.
The more we learn, the more this makes the IRS sound like an mafioso operation.
I know a little about enterprise email systems and I have worked at places with an email system much like as the IRS system is described. I can buy someone’s disk drive crashing and they lost their locally archived .pst files. I can even buy that they only archived 6 months worth and rotated backup tapes on a 1 year rotation. What I can’t buy is all six of the other IRS senior officials having the same problem. Anyone can have a disk crash, it happens all the time. Doesn’t happen to all seven of the people’s emails that you have subpoenaed, though. Not in real life.
Hard copies, as required by law?