The interesting fact is that losing emails are common in the government. Not like this is anything new in government. Issa's whining about the lost emails rings hollow when they were aware of these types of problems for years including all the lost "emails" during the bush administration.
The real scandal here lies well beyond the provocative details of the missing e-mail. Quite simply, from a recordkeeping perspective, federal agencies have no idea how to manage their e-mail. Agency employees do not understand that many of their e-mail messages qualify as records that must be preserved for archival purposes, a requirement imposed by the Federal Records Act. And agencies are unwilling to invest in the electronic recordkeeping infrastructure that would ensure e-mail is properly managed and preserved. As a result, many, including the IRS, have a “print to paper” policy, meaning e-mail is preserved only if individual agency employees go to the time and trouble of printing them out and placing them in the appropriate paper files. When that doesn’t happen — as is frequently the case — e-mail may be lost forever as backup tapes routinely are overwritten and older messages often are automatically deleted to save space.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/t...story.html
The real scandal here lies well beyond the provocative details of the missing e-mail. Quite simply, from a recordkeeping perspective, federal agencies have no idea how to manage their e-mail. Agency employees do not understand that many of their e-mail messages qualify as records that must be preserved for archival purposes, a requirement imposed by the Federal Records Act. And agencies are unwilling to invest in the electronic recordkeeping infrastructure that would ensure e-mail is properly managed and preserved. As a result, many, including the IRS, have a “print to paper” policy, meaning e-mail is preserved only if individual agency employees go to the time and trouble of printing them out and placing them in the appropriate paper files. When that doesn’t happen — as is frequently the case — e-mail may be lost forever as backup tapes routinely are overwritten and older messages often are automatically deleted to save space.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/t...story.html
