More from yesterday’s IRS testimony
Well, now we know—at least, according to Koskinen—the answer to one of the questions I posed a few days ago about whether computer crashes were “a routine matter” at the IRS.
Here’s Koskinen:
It is not unusual for computers anywhere to fail, especially at the IRS in light of the aged equipment IRS employees often have to use in light of the continual cuts in its budget these past four years. Since Jan. 1 of this year, for example, over 2,000 employees have suffered hard drive crashes.
That’s impressive, and not in a good way. Let’s do a little math: the IRS currently has about 89,000 employees. So in the last six months, approximately two and a quarter per cent of all IRS employees suffered hard drive crashes, or about 1 in every 50 people. Let’s just accept that as the truth, although I see no particular reason to believe anything Koskinen says and would prefer some corroborating evidence.
Here are my further questions for him, or preferably for some IT person at the IRS: is that the rate at which crashes always happen there, or has there been some sort of increase in crashes lately, perhaps since the investigation began? When did the six people under investigation in addition to Lerner have their hard drives fail? Was it within months or so of each other, weeks, days, hours, minutes? How many people were being investigated in addition to these six, and were they suspected of being important figures or were they just peripheral at best? None, any, many?
If there had been a total of three hundred and fifty people under suspicion/investigation as serious as that of these seven (that’s seven including Lerner), then the rate of computer failure we see here might begin to make some sense—that is, if I correctly recall my long-ago math course in combinations and permutations, which I probably do not. What are the odds of this happening?
Lastly, computers can have hard drive crashes and yet still retain recoverable data if a knowledgeable person digs hard enough for it. In fact, it’s my understanding that data recovery is usually possible under such circumstances. Lerner’s computer crash and that of the six others are distinguished by claims that no data survived. How common is that when computers crash? Or is it just common at the IRS for some reason, because they have special self-destructing computers? And speaking of destruction, were the hard drives of the other six then destroyed by the IRS, just as Lerner’s was?
Here’s a fine exchange from the hearing:
Koskinen referred several times on Monday to a lack of budget resources within the IRS, and raised the issue when asked why the agency didn’t do a better job keeping a backup of Lerner’s emails…
When Tennessee Republican Rep Scott DesJarlais asked Koskinen how much money it would take to replace the IRS’s computer systems in order to prevent another major data loss, he answered that it would cost between $10 and $30 million.
In a tense moment, DesJarlais then reminded him that the IRS paid $89 million in bonuses last year, including $1 million to agency employees who owed back taxes.
Issa added that the agency has an $1.8 billion information technology budget.
And then there’s this question, which is also one I had asked the other day in the addendum to this post:
Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz asked Koskinen a question he couldn’t answer: Why didn’t the IRS restore Lerner’s emails from a six-month ‘disaster recovery’ backup tape?…
Agency guidelines require that “IRS offices will not store the official recordkeeping copy of e-mail messages that are federal records ONLY on the electronic mail system.”
The rules also require IRS offices to back up email messages to “a separate electronic recordkeeping system.”
Ah, but it depends on what the meaning of “store” is. Store for a month? A day? A moment?
My question is, when Ryan asked about getting told on Monday, what did Koskinen mean by, “What have you done with the information we gave you?”.
He said it twice.
Ah, but it depends on what the meaning of “store” is. Store for a month? A day? A moment?
The IRS says that taxpayers should keep records for 7 years. IIRC, Records Retention protocol in the real world is for 5 years.
Koskinen dixit:
I don’t buy “the IRS has really old computers” line, when coupled with an $1.8/ billion IT budget. Or rather, if this is the case, then a bunch of idiots have been running the IRS. If there are 89,000 IRS employees, and a middling Dell tower @$500- reliable and perfect for number and database crunching- were purchased for every employee, that would be $45 million, which is a trivial amount in view of the IRS’s $1.8 billion IT budget. If this were cut down to replacing computers every 5 years, this would be an expense of $10 million per year. You are going to tell me that the IRS is using “aged equipment?” Then those running the IRS are REALLY dumb, no matter how well credentialed they are. It is a trivial business expense- $10 million a year- to replace computers every 5 years.
Mr. Koskinen, you are going to tell me that Lois Lerner, who probably earns in excess of $100,000 per year, used a 15 year old computer w 500 MB RAM w 10 MB HDD- that is the machine most likely to have a hard drive failure? If so then the IRS is REALLY stupid.
But hard drive failures do occur, even if I have never experienced one. What’s the likelihood that 7 specific IRS drives — those of the “persons of interest” — would crash in the same year?
Which means the IRS has been scamming us.
As Gomer Pyle once said, “Surprise, surprise, surprise.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6_1Pw1xm9U Surprise, surprise, surprise.
Ed Bonderenka:
I noticed that as well and believe I heard some snark there (and certainly saw a smirk). I got the same feeling I had during the Candy Crowley (may she live in shame forever) debate when the President smirked as he was about to spring the tag-team trap and said, “”Please proceed, governor”.
Koskinen seemed to employ that same kind of set up and smirk. Wonder what the trap is/was? Or maybe his smirk is just a deformity or condition (a la the Joker) or some kind of nervous tic?
Gringo:
Actually, in the case of the IRS’s official records, I think I heard they’re supposed to archive them in perpetuity. Don’t know if that’s true.
Koskinen, of course, would respond to that by saying emails aren’t “official records.”
He’s quite the bureaucrat.
“When Tennessee Republican Rep Scott DesJarlais asked Koskinen how much money it would take to replace the IRS’s computer systems in order to prevent another major data loss, he answered that it would cost between $10 and $30 million.
In a tense moment, DesJarlais then reminded him that the IRS paid $89 million in bonuses last year, including $1 million to agency employees who owed back taxes.”
The bonuses are important, don’t ya know? Having quality equipment and providing quality work – not so much.
Please stop giving them an OUT by saying “it could only happen if they were really stupid”. No one who’s heard the story believes them, but given the “stupidity out”, allows people who overestimate themselves and underestimate others to allow the agency its one slim chance in 6 billion to wriggle out of responsibility with “Yeah, maybe they are just that stupid.”
No, government bureaucrats are not that stupid. They may be stupid about a lot of things, but not about this. They are supremely knowledgeable about rules and procedures. Anyone in the private sector telling such whoppers would have already been presumed guilty of wrongdoing. I suggest we stop asking questions and start presuming the same.
“Hope makes a good breakfast but a poor supper.”
All of these despicable scandals owned by Obama and his regime and not one arrest, prison sentence or impeachment.
I am so weary, enervated and frustrated. When will justice be done and truth prevail.
And has the invasion at our southern border been halted yet and the invaders sent home?
And why have the number of mosques in this country doubled since 9/11. I would think it should be the other way around.
The job of a government is to protect its citizens not its invaders.
The IRS is aimed at good citizens and it has also been charged with siccing obamacare on us.
And we are depending on Congress for help?
One happy thing. Obama went to lunch at a Chipotle and the people in the place ignored him.
I have seen US soldiers and Marines get spontaneous applause and cheering in airports and Bush would get a rousing hand of applause, I am quite sure. Obama was not only ignored but he stuck his dirty hands over the sneeze guard.
Some clever commenter called it another overreach of executive powers.
Sorry to ramble but….
reticent:
Who are you addressing? Who’s saying this is about stupidity?
When he said that the fix for the email system would take $10-30 million, he was way overestimating the cost by conflating two things.
He was answering the question, “How much would it cost to have servers capable of holding all employee emails for a number of years without limiting the size of any user’s account?”
The answer to the question “How much would it cost to have archival backups of all employee emails for a number of years?” would have been far, far, far, far less.
neo, everybody is saying it.
McArdle’s article, “There’s no way it could have happened. EXCEPT if management was grossly stupid or incompetent.” Another article on Blaze citing a specialist on Microsoft Exchange saying, “No way UNLESS the agency is unbelievably stupid and disabled all default settings .” Gringo above, “If so, THEN the IRS is really stupid.”
No, no, no. Not stupidity. Deliberate malfeasance masquerading as stupidity. But the public, if given that out and if so inclined, will shake their heads and say, “yeah, stupidity. That’s all. It’s bad, but it’s just stupidity.”
The odds that the apparatchiks in the Obama regime are not liars is 1 in 600 trillion. The MSM will continue to ignore this abuse of power or portray it as partisan bickering. The House needs to stop chasing its tail in committee hearing. The stonewalling and in your face obstruction of justice will never stop. Drastic times call for drastic measures.
IMO the House must cut off all funds for the IRS, EPA, DOJ, and all other departments except the DOD until an independent special prosecutor is appointed. Next impeach Holder right before the new crop of senators take their oath of office.
reticent:
Well, I’m not saying it. Nor are most people here, or most people I’ve read.
The brazeness of the liars sent to the Hill by The White House is jawdropping.
As I watch these hearings, I can’t help but compare them with the Watergate hearings in 1973. Long time ago, but I remember that John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s inner circle, came across as insufferably smug and contemptuous of the Senate’s Watergate committee, much like Koskinen is of this Congressional committee. It took John Dean’s testimony for him to change his tune.
I also wonder about the combative aggressiveness of the folks questioning Koskinen and whether they wouldn’t be much more effective if they were able to project the common sense and folksiness of Sam Ervin, the chairman of the Watergate committee.
I work in IT. I have been willing to allow that there is just enough possibility of Lerner’s email having been lost via a hard drive failure to make it impossible to say with assurance that they’re lying. However, I’m confident that Koskinen’s statement about the rate of hd failure is false. A true hd failure is a fairly rare event these days, and by “these days” I mean for the past 10 years and more.
When many people say “hard drive” they mean the entire computer except for the monitor, keyboard, and mouse–the case that houses the drive, the CPU, etc. I could believe a 2% rate of *something* in that box failing. Maybe. But if, for instance, the video fails, no harm is done to any data.
It just gets more and more difficult to entertain the possibility that they’re telling the truth.
Mac,
They are lying. Like the scorpion riding the frog across the river, its ingrained in their nature. Its simply what they do. “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time its enemy action.”
Gringo, 4:11 pm —
Gringo, an issue with your source’s math. Your source writes, “Simple probability calculation: 4% (the failure rate) raised to the 7th power (since 7 specific people were involved) . . . which works out to odds of about 1 in 6 billion.”
My issue is that the calculation assumes that the seven failures were statistically independent events. They most assuredly were *not* (except in the minds of fools and excuse-makers). Sez M J R, they are either the same event or are *very* highly correlated events.
In any event, I say we’re playing the lefties’ game by even engaging in these sorts of what-ifs. (I just did it myself. It’s tempting.) These are *obvious* lies — as neo pointed out a few days ago, no one on *either* side believes them. It is (again) a deliberate, arrogant taunting by the left of the right, because the lefties at this point can say or do any d#mn thing they want to say or do, and nothing — absolutely *nothing* — will happen to them.
And they know it and the righties know it.
So why engage in these “one in six billion” exercises? The lefties are enjoying it immensely.
Megan McArdle has an interesting column on this:
An IRS Conspiracy? Not Likely … Yet
Basically, she says she’s waiting for more information before coming to any conclusions, but in the meantime she looks at this from several angles and offers her “provisional thoughts” — worth a read.
I was struck by her comment that she’s “heard from a number of federal employees who lost data in exactly the way Lois Lerner did”. That resonated with me because I was working for a federal contractor in 2007 in Washington, D.C., when we had a complete power breakdown during a violent D.C. summer storm and my computer was fried. One tech guy spent two or three days trying to recover the stuff that was only on my desktop and not on the backup server and couldn’t do it. Granted, he may not have done everything he could have to recover it.
Ann,
I read the article, and it does not pass the sniff test. Government employees answer to their political masters. If a senator asks an IRS bureaucrat to hound a pac or a single citizen that bureaucrat will follow orders and earn a bonus. Shining examples of integrity do not fill the ranks of the apparatchiks.
Ann…
The Number One reason that data is lost is that the index is scrambled. (FAT table and its kin)
When this happens various (ignorant) techs may attempt to bring the system back up — solo. That is, by using the stand-alone system to recover various files/ rebuild the FAT (and its later variants: NTFS) etc.
However, the fast solution is to pull the drive out of the box and install it in another system as a DAUGHTER drive.
Then corruption of the index and operating system can normally be skipped past by the appropriate software.
A hard ware crash NEVER means that all of the data was instantly obliterated. (Unless it was detonated/ nuked/ fireballed) What is termed a ‘crash’ means that a critical logical data stream has been hopelessly corrupted.
And that the read/write heads have crashed into the platters. (if even momentarily)
It is customary and routine for these platters to be extracted and remounted — in a ultra high purity clean room environment — to extract the data with a fresh set of read write heads.
Since MSFT’s latest indexes/ operating systems also create simultaneous back-ups (as a compressed archive file) as a matter of routine, (ALL DELL machines have had this for twenty-years) It’s no problem at all to rebuild lost files in seconds.
If you were to pull the plug on your MSFT/ Linux/ Apple machine at this very instant…
Upon boot up you’d find that the machine is standing ready to instantly ‘recover’ all of your ‘unsaved’ files… as backup files.
This was possible because reaching into the archive is automatically done when the system boots up from an abnormal shut down.
This is routine for ALL widely available operating systems — and has been this way for years and years.
&&&
In sum, every word they’re uttering is a Hitlerian scale lie.
Epic, then.
Ann, no offence, but seriously? You, along with McArdle, seem to have an extreme willingness to suspend disbelief in this instance. McArdle’s article is one of the ones I talk about above. She strains mightily to give the administration an out by saying it could have happened, but only if there was gross incompetence. If memory serves, she only addresses the scenario of Lerner “losing” her emails. She doesn’t address the likelihood of 7 similarly implausible scenarios happening within a short span of time. She can only give the veneer of plausibility to this insulting explanation by ignoring statistical probability, by ignoring standard industry practice, and by ignoring the fact that it is the IRS that administers the standard for all private firms and thus is thoroughly versed in what is required. One good question on the failure rate might be this — how many cases have the IRS withdrawn from due to spoilation of evidence due to hard drive crashes?
A good article on the tech system is the one in the Blaze where a specialist on Microsoft Exchange talks about how nearly impossible it is to lose emails. Unless you want to by overriding default settings. Kind of like how credit card verification default settings were disabled in the last presidential campaign so that foreign contributions could “unwittingly” be accepted. Your IT guy notwithstanding, it is exceedingly hard to lose all trace of everything — everywhere … unless you are really trying.
reticent,
I think you’re mischaracterizing McArdle’s position. Yes, she’s hesitant to declare a conspiracy, but she does not say it’s impossible. And she does address those six other hand drive crashes, and with suspicion:
Oh Ann,
We are past the point of no return.
There are still people who cling to the belief that obeying Authority will save them and their kin.
In reality, the Authorities don’t even see the ants they step on, and certainly won’t maintain their promise to ants.
McArdlle will only move from mild suspicion to a lightly rendered judgment that someone somewhere in this administration is culpable for something when it is proven that 10,000 angels can dance on a pin. That is her schtick — to be the voice of reason who, nevertheless, can never really find anything wrong with this administration.
She wants to see more evidence? What evidence would that be? The 7 scrubbed, shredded, and recycled hard drives? The overwritten backups? And how does our chief executive know that there’s not a smidgen of corruption when there was no evidence for him to examine?
I believe in the path of least resistance too. Please understand, modern data systems leave bread crumbs everywhere. It is really, really hard to wipe all evidence of it everywhere. The path of least resistance would have been that there were copies upon copies of these documents from multiple sources within the agency, backups upon backups, logs of these documents and even logs of logs from a number of other sources, etc. In a case where *every trace* of that evidence is gone, the path of least resistance says: either the explanation is a lie, or the documents were purposefully scrubbed, and/or the policy was enacted to allow for the purposeful scrubbing of the documents. McArdle knows that, but she’s like me when I’m in a horror movie: I squeeze my eyes shut tight.
McArdle voted for Obama the first time.
I don’t know whether she voted for him the second time, because I stopped paying attention to her after the first time.
On the 2000 hard drive crashes – data from most crashed drives can be recovered. How many of these 2000 crashed drives were of the “can’t recover even one good sector, must promptly shred the entire drive” type of failure?
Solution! Congress exercises its inherent constitutional power and jails Lerner for contempt. The jail cell is at the Capitol Police building.
No reliance on the US Attorney or any federal judge.m
Approved by the Supreme Court in 1935.
Neo,
I finally figured out who Koskinen looks like – Gollum, Lord of the Rings.
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1790946304/ch0000152
Maybe you can do a side by side “separated at birth” post.
Yes, cornhead…
Bring Lerner, Koskinen, and others to testify and immediately put them and their legal council behind the bars in the Capitol cells. If the house fails to take drastic action, the entire republican caucus needs to go home and never return to DC.
M J R, the point of the calculation on the seven hard drive failures is to show that that the seven hard drive failures were NOT statistically unrelated events, as the odds of their being unrelated were one in 6 billion.
And as others have pointed out, hard drive failures usually do not mean loss of data.
McArdle supposedly also has a background in finance and economics, so she presumably knows math and statistics. For her to say that the rolling failures of the 7 hard drives of the 7 persons of interest is “hard to believe” is, to me, her attempt to semantically obscure the breathtaking dimensions of the lie.
It’s really a matter of math. Even if we assume that there was a very high 4% failure rate of hard disks, 1 out of 25 chances for the first failure (and it was not really that high). By the time we get to the seventh failure, just to repeat what’s been said, the odds of that sequence of events happening are 1 in 6 billion chances.
Your odds of winning most lottos are about 1 in 15 million. Your odds of winning Powerball are about 1 in 175 million. So you’re 34 times more likely to win Powerball than to have this string of hard drive failures.
For McArdle, a math person, to characterize those odds as merely “hard to believe” tells me that she is straining not to see. The explanation is not simply hard to believe; it is statistically untenable.
The ghost of Rosemary Woods was seen on the premises. …
nah, she would have floated the emails to Issa. 😉
So are they saying that ONLY the six + Lerner the Harridan had these Conveeeenient hard-drive crashes with total meltdown of the disks?
They are, well, hell, words fail me.
McArdle may have voted for Comrade Zero a second time. She’s too intelligent to put forth such an idiotic argument in good faith.
The center, as Yeats noted, can not hold. Unless the IRS (forget all the other) scandel brings this vile weasel regime down; there will be no recourse but the cartridge box. At least I reload in an effort to do my small part.
Gringo, 11:36 pm —
Gotcha.
Peace (and all that) . . .
BTW, the e-mails are SURELY on some NSA hard drive.
Congress needs to attack that angle.
The jail isn’t in the Capitol building but at 13th and D.
Also there has to be a contempt citation and Gollum hasn’t been cited for contempt. He answered the questions; in a fashion.
parker: what I posted on the “vile weasel” page:
Muscle needed, not words. What if the House directed its Sgt-at-Arms to deputize and arm men to effect arrests, e.g. Holder and Koskinen? It would make a great face-off, bullets might fly and the no longer verbal battle would be joined.
One way or another we must cease being stuck on stupid.
Thank you for giving me encouragement. Let Issa know. The House should arrest and confine the bastards.
The claim that the emails were unrecoverable is simply unbelievable. When our server crashed, it was removed from our office building and taken to Kroll Ontrack in Reston, VA and they recovered all our files in three days. They returned the server and hard drives and it was obvious the hard drives had been opened. Meanwhile our IT people installed a new server and then reloaded the recovered files. Nothing was lost. The IRS is in effect claiming they are not lying or committing perjury but they are just total incompetents.
“Gollum hasn’t been cited for contempt.”
Lerner violated her fifth.
Some clever commenter called it another overreach of executive powers.
True that.
As for when the Day of Redemption or Retribution will be here, my standard prediction is another 12-14 years at this rate of growth, corruption, and evil hell power. Evil only grows via corruption, it never grows via creation from imagination. Imagination is not necessary.
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