Arya upon hearing the IRS had lost a years worth of Emails.

So, the IRS wants us to believe that they "lost" two years worth of emails, due to a computer "crash".  I picture the IRS official who informed Congress of this using finger quotes.  Because it doesn't pass the reality test.  They might have gotten away with this thirty or forty years ago, when computers were magic devices that no one understood except for programmers (come to think of it, given my experience with the so called most wired generation in history, they might still get away with it) but not today when most people understand how email works.

But, lets look at how the government makes entities that work with it keep records of email traffic, because i have experience with that.  When I worked in Iraq, the government made us keep records of every transaction we performed on an "official" computer (those hooked into the Big Contractor's Network).  How pervasive was this you ask?  To print a document on my printer that was three feet away, I had to send a signal to the server on base.  That signal would go to the uplink on base and from there a satellite, then down to a server farm in the UAE, back to space, down to a server farm in the UK, back to space, then down to a server farm in Houston, where it is to be stored for ten years.  Then the same signal had to make the return trip.  Normally there was no lag time - but the point is, we were storing things on at least three servers.  Now, the IRS says they can find 67000 emails from 2009 - 2013 - except the critical emails from 2011.  If I told the IRS sorry, I can find my records from 2010 but not 2011, take my word for it there's nothing actionable tax wise in that year, they'd be all over it like stink on excrement.  To me it sounds like they're trying to hide the diamonds in the dross - they've been dragging this investigation out saying its a politcally motivated witch hunt, yet every time we turn around there's more data that somehow appears.