The IRS hired a private firm to back up all its emails but fired it after Lois Lerner’s hard drive crashed

 Much of the focus on the IRS targeting scandal over the last week or two has revolved around Lois Lerner’s now destroyed hard drive, and while this is understandable because of the sensational aspect to the story, it is misguided because emails are not stored on hard drives. It is true that there could possibly be some interesting and pertinent information on her hard drive which could shed some light on this scandal, but the emails will not be found there even if the hard drive was recoverable.

  The hard drive is a diversion, a stalling tactic, which is being used by the IRS and the Congress seems to be falling for it when they should be focused on the servers, for servers are where the emails will be found.

  It turns out, according to this story, that the IRS had a contract with a company called Sonasoft to back up the corrupt agency’s servers.

The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.”

Sonasoft even used its contract with the IRS to promote its business via Twitter:

If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?

  However, right around the time the Congress began investigating the IRS the corrupt agency ended its relationship with Sonasoft.

Sonasoft was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.

But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right.

  The timing of this decision is quite interesting to say the least but it really does not matter when or why the IRS fired Sonasoft because the bottom line is this: Sonasoft was backing up IRS emails during the time frame of the missing emails, so it stands to reason Sonasoft has back ups of these emails if the company was doing what it was paid to do.

  It is time for the Congress to turn its attention from the destroyed hard drive and start focusing on Sonasoft for that is where the emails should be.