Has the Internal Revenue Service been systematically evading federal record-keeping laws? On Monday the Cause of Action Institute sued the IRS and commissioner John Koskinen for refusing to preserve electronic employee communications that concern official business.
Cause of Action says that in 2010 the IRS struck a little-noticed agreement with the National Treasury Employees Union not to record employees’ instant messages. The watchdog group also says that in response to its Freedom of Information Act requests for text messages sent by senior IRS officials, the agency replied that due to “routine system housekeeping” and “spacing constraints,” IRS text messages are retained for only 14 days before they are deleted.
Of course, the staff at IRS sees this illegal deal with the union as a feature, not an unfortunate bug that they simply cannot overcome.
Mind you, when I worked in the financial industry, our IT department disabled all instant message services (even the proprietary in-house version) and blocked all access to third party email systems. It was primarily a means of avoiding getting hammered in litigation. Should a client sue us, pretty much everything would be liable to discovery, and the ban on IM and third party email made it easy to show we weren’t trying to hide any records from discovery.
The IRS, however, much like so many other federal agencies, feels that the inconvenience of federal laws specifically mandating that they preserve information in such a manner is too likely to align the citizenry against them, and thus, rules and laws should not apply to them.
Tap dancing........
Posted by: Glenn Mark Cassel | 05/27/2016 at 11:14 AM