The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled a long-term contractor that stored agency emails just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s and six other IRS officials’ computers.
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 was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.
Ironically, Sonasoft promoted its relationship with the IRS in a tweet from 2009.
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— Sonasoft.com (@Sonasoft) October 9, 2009
On Monday evening, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen faced a primetime House Oversight Committee hearing in which Chairman Darrell Issa said would focus on whether the agency broke Federal law in the way Lerner and her associates’ emails were handled.
Issa’s Oversight Committee requested that the IRS make available IRS deputy chief counsel for procurement and administration Thomas Kane for a transcribed interview about the destruction of Lerner’s emails, but the IRS refused. Oversight Committee staff next requested a briefing from the IRS on its email retention programs, but the IRS did not provide it.