IRS admits to mistake for court case, promises to stop erasing hard drives

The IRS has put an emergency stay on deleting its computer hard drives and devices such as BlackBerrys, with the commissioner saying in a letter to Congress on Wednesday that the agency goofed in deleting a key hard drive last year that was supposed to be preserved as part of a court case.

Commissioner John Koskinen also said the agency has discovered a backup for that hard drive and may be able to find records critical to the court case. But he said that was a “fortunate” occurrence and vowed to try to reform the tax agency’s practices.

“I have ordered a halt to the erasure and recycling of all employee devices, including hard drives and mobile devices, for all current and departing employees,” he said in a letter to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican.

He also said the IRS is changing its procedures for when it is required to hold documents for court cases: It will preserve the records not only of the person in question, but his or her supervisor’s records as well.

In the longer term, the IRS is trying to ditch computer hard drives for storage altogether and to require that records be saved on the agency’s main network.

“It has long been our view — validated, unfortunately, by the events of recent years — that the service’s reliance on employee hard drives as an archival records store is suboptimal, not least because they are vulnerable to equipment failure resulting in data loss,” he wrote.