IRS Releases E-Mails Regarding Missing Lerner Data

From: Melcher Glenn J

Information relevant to this matter will include all communications, documents drafted or reviewed, spreadsheets created or reviewed, notes from meetings, notes relating to specific taxpayers and/or applications, information requests to applicants, training materials, or any other items that relate to the process by which selection criteria were used to identify tax-exempt applications for advocacy organizations for review, including but not limited to Be On the Look Out, from January 1, 2008 to the present.

Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Service has an obligation to search, identify, preserve, and isolate all paper records and electronically stored information (ESI) potentially relevant to the above-described matter. Generally, ESI includes, but is not limited to: all e-mail and attachments; word processing documents, spreadsheets, graphics and presentation documents, images, text files, and other information stored on hard drives or removable media (e.g., desktops, portable thumb drives and CDs), metadata, databases, instant messages, transaction logs, audio and video files, voicemail, webpages, computer logs, text messages, and backup and archived material.

Although we do not need you to gather the ESI at this time, please ensure that steps are put in place so that both ESI information and any paper documents are preserved and not deleted. You may already have been contacted by IRS IT to begin the preservation process but that does not change your obligations to preserve information and to respond to this email. Under no circumstances should ESI information or paper documents be destroyed until this matter is completed or a litigation hold is lifted.

Please provide an e-mail response to this e-mail within five business days. In that e-mail, please also provide your SEID and indicate whether you created ESI of the following types while working on anything related to this matter.

Also provide a brief description of the paper files or documents you have related to this case and an estimate of the quantity of such paper files or documents, if any.

Once located, the ESI needs to be preserved and isolated. Preservation of ESI means that the ESI cannot be altered or destroyed and must be maintained in its native format throughout the duration of this matter. This means that all normal retention schedules related to the ESI have been suspended until such time as the ESI is isolated. ESI is isolated when a mirror image of the ESI in its native format is created and moved to a separate drive, CD, or server for storage for the duration of the litigation. This office will coordinate with the Service's IT personnel to have your ESI isolated and preserved. You should expect IT personnel to need access to your computer and any removable storage devices when they collect the ESI. In the meantime, do not alter or destroy the ESI. The destruction of ESI could result in judicial sanctions against the agency. This office also will coordinate the collection of any related paper documents you may have.

In the event you received this e-mail and, after a search of your records, you determine that you were not involved in any way in this matter, please provide an e-mail response to this e-mail within five business days informing the sender you were not involved in the subject matter described above..

If you have questions related to this e-mail, please contact the undersigned immediately.

• "You have exceeded your storage limit on your mailbox".

• Delete some mail from your mailbox or contact your system administrator to adjust your storage limit. (Consider whether any of the items you want to delete may be a federal record. IRM 1.10.3.3.2 above.)

• "You have exceeded your storage limit on your mailbox".

• Delete some mail from your mailbox or contact your system administrator to adjust your storage limit. (Consider whether any of the items you want to delete may be a Federal Record. See IRM 1.10.3.3.2 above.)

Lois' hard drive has crashed on her computer and will be without email. If you need to contact Lois please call her at 202-283-8848. For immediate attention, contact Akaisha Douglas at 202-283-9488.

Unfortunately the news is not good. The sectors on the hard drive were bad which made your data unrecoverable.

I am very sorry. Everyone involved tried their best.

As a last resort, we sent your hard drive to CI's forensic lab to attempt data recovery. The CI tech working on the recovery is unexpectedly out until Aug 3rd and promised to update me when he returns.

I will send you a status on Friday morning.

I checked with the technician and he still has your drive. He wanted to exhaust all avenues to recover the data before sending it to the "hard drive cemetery." Unfortunately, after receiving assistance from several highly skilled technicians including HP experts, he still cannot recover the data.

I do have one other possibility that I am looking into and I hope to update you on the progress soon.

Lillie Wilburn will call Diane in the morning. If she can't fix it nobody can.