IRS moves on digitizing records

After years of congressional scrutiny, high-ranking IRS officials told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Feb. 11 that they were committed to improving their processes for retaining and accessing data.

"We're making significant progress," said Ed Killen, director of privacy, governmental liaison and disclosure at the IRS.

The email messages of senior IRS executives are being archived in electronically accessible formats in perpetuity, while the second tier of managers will have their messages stored for 15 years. Killen said the goal is to have all employees' email archived electronically by the end of the year as part of a plan to move away from an approach that has long relied on printing and filing and the use backup tapes.

Killen acknowledged the benefits of a fully digitized system and said, "Ideally, you would want to be able to do keyword searches" to fulfill document production requests.

Shifting to an electronic archive will involve moving email servers into two main data centers, said IRS Chief Technology Officer Terry Milholland.

Jeff Tribiano, deputy commissioner for operations at the IRS, said the agency is also beginning to store hard-drive information on networked databases rather than on backup tapes.

Although Killen said the IRS generally complies with guidance from the National Archives and Records Administration, "we certainly have work to do."

The hearing also offered a glimpse down the government's incident-disclosure rabbit hole.

As Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) noted, lawmakers began their latest look into IRS records management in January, when they learned that the IRS had wiped the hard drive of a former employee involved in litigation with Microsoft.

Weeks later, the IRS reported that it had copied the data after all, but by then the committee was interested in the IRS' Feb. 3 hardware failure. Finally, on Feb. 8, the committee asked Milholland for more details about "the breach" -- by which they meant the hardware failure -- and Milholland apparently misunderstood and revealed for the first time that the agency had suffered a bot attack.

"If we hadn't started asking about another incident, we wouldn't have known about this incident," Chaffetz said of the bot attack.