From the AP article:
Investigators from the House Ways and Means Committee interviewed IRS technicians Monday.
The federal IT sector is heavily outsourced -- the investigators should be looking to see which firm(s) provided IT services to the IRS in 2010 and bringing those firms in. There should have been contract documents specifying requirements about backing up email servers.
This part is also laughable:
Lerner’s computer crashed in the summer of 2011, depriving investigators of many of her prior emails. Flax’s computer crashed in December 2011, Camp and Boustany said.
Sorry, but federal government IT standards in 2011 required that PCs run XP or Win-7. Even a Linux and BSD guy like myself knows that XP was reliable enough that it is extremely unlikely that both of their computers crashed with data loss.
I can't find the specific federal IT standard that was in place during 2011, but it did require the use of Windows XP or later. Here's a September 10,2009 article titled: "Federal agencies prepare to make the leap from XP to Windows 7": http://gcn.com/articles/2009/0...