The loss of those critical email messages within the IRS in NOT
understandable and NOT plausible; it is at the least gross mismanagement, if
not criminal negligence. Any practitioner worth their salt knows that
personal archiving should be prohibited in the workplace, as indicated in
Nancy Flynn's  "The e-Policy Handbook" (AMACOM, 2009).

Also, there are multiple servers that email passes through, and with a
proper forensic investigation, the email messages can likely be recovered,
even if the IRS changed email services providers. Unless, that is, the hard
drives of these servers were physically destroyed -- all of them, totally
and completely -- which would certainly be a criminal act in this case.

To say there was no money for a technological solution, is to say that
somewhere in the (2013) IRS budget of approximately $2.5 BILLION dollars for
'Information Services' and 'Business Systems Modernization' they couldn't
allocate a few million to implement an email management program including
bona fide email archiving software.  Pure balderdash.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/newsroom/budget-in-brief-fy2013.pdf

Properly implemented, email archiving software would preserve the integrity
of email messages by capturing them in real-time, and by using compression
and single instance storage (SIS) so an email sent to 10,000 employees would
only be stored once, with 'stubs' or 'pointers' used to indicate and
regenerate the entire distribution list, allowing for any of those original
email messages to be produced with absolute integrity and authenticity,
including preservation of metadata and attachments, throughout the complete
chain of custody.

The entire process of archiving, storing, and backing up email records could
and should be automated, there is simply no excuse for it.

And the problem with the "Capstone Approach" is that is is an OPTIONAL email
management program for federal agencies, so results are going to be
haphazard and inconsistent - completely at odds with any legally defensible
Information Governance program, and also, Capstone states that officials at
higher levels will have all their email messages archived, whereas others in
lower echelons will not. That will clearly change behavior.

Maybe it's a first effort, but Capstone isn't going to work in the long-run,
and some people in the IRS (all politics aside) need to be held accountable
for breaking the law and not ensuring those email records were retained.


Robert Smallwood
E-Records Institute at IMERGE Consulting
San Diego, CA

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