Paul L. Caron
Dean





Wednesday, July 16, 2014

The IRS Scandal, Day 433

IRS Logo 2Forbes:  Is the IRS Scandal Microsoft's Fault?, by Gene Marks:

Hmm….maybe Microsoft is to blame for this whole IRS-email thing.

Just last week, “…a second federal judge has now ordered the IRS to explain under oath how the agency lost emails from former division director Lois Lerner, the woman at the heart of the Tea Party targeting scandal. U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton told Obama administration lawyers on Friday he wants to see an affidavit explaining what happened with Lerner’s hard drive. The IRS claims her computer suffered a crash in 2011 that wiped her email records at the time clean.”

Ah-hah! It’s a brilliant ploy. Can’t provide emails requested by the courts? Then just blame the computer guys! The computers crashed. It was a blue screen of death. You know what’s it like with Windows, right? We’ve all had this happen to us before. Who hasn’t had their computer crash? Curse you, Microsoft! This must be your fault! You’ve foiled us again!

I don’t know if the IRS did anything wrong – that’s for the courts to decide. But I do know a little something about information technology. And this is an IT issue. Judges. Lawyers. IRS people. Congressmen. The Media. Everyone’s trying to get to the bottom of the lost emails. But there’s one group of people missing from the conversation: the tech people. I don’t mean the ones who work for the IRS. They’re scrambling, I’m sure. The ones who should be subpoenaed are the ones who work at IT firms, like mine, across the country. They will tell a different story. When we hear that emails were just “lost,” especially in 2011, we scratch our heads in amazement. Ask any IT firm, the clients they serve, or the IT people that work in corporate America: e-mails don’t get “lost.” And frankly, computers don’t really crash very often. That was a great excuse in…oh…1995. But not anymore.

In other words: you can’t blame Microsoft. Nice try. ...

[D]id Ms. Lerner’s computer really crash, wiping out all her data, including emails? That story’s really hard to believe for anyone with an IT background. It’s easy to blame Microsoft for our problems. That used to be a great excuse. But that excuse is getting harder and harder for anyone, even the IRS, to make.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/07/the-irs-2.html

IRS News, IRS Scandal, Tax | Permalink

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