Thread by @EpochTimes

The man who shot and killed 26 people at a church in #Texas in 2017 used guns he wouldn’t have been able to purchase if the @USAirForce had properly managed its records.

Article by @IvanPentchoukov (Thread👇) theepochtimes.com/the-illusion-o…

On 6 occasions, #Military officials failed to send Devin Kelley’s records to @FBI while the @USAirForce investigated, court-martialed, and imprisoned him for abusing his wife and stepson.

Rather than being an anomaly, the preventable failures that contributed to the massacre are a symptom of a vast problem spanning the entire federal government, according to two experts with decades of experience—Daryll Prescott and Don Lueders.

“Billions have been spent on records management applications, which are not working and people are not using them. It’s a disservice to the citizens of the United States and a disservice to the people of this industry,” said Daryll Prescott.

According to Lueders, the records management applications was never used, including at @TheJusticeDept, the @StateDept, the @USTreasury, the #IRS, and multiple components of the @DeptofDefense, such as the White House Communications Agency.

“People are not rewarded for records management,” a #Pentagon official told @EpochTimes, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

@MHRuskin, a former @FBI special agent, likewise confirmed to @EpochTimes he had never used a dedicated application to manage his records.

“There was a big paperless failure during Mueller’s tenure,” said @MHRuskin, who is also a contributor to @EpochTimes. “He was pushing aggressively to digitize everything…No one had the [courage] to tell the director they couldn’t meet his deadline.”

@mhruskin Despite its stuffy title, records management cuts to the core of the relationship between the government and the American people, who fund it.

The ongoing contract is based on #Accountability and #Transparency, neither of which are possible without records.

@mhruskin “You don’t have a democracy without accountability and transparency,” Lueders said. “You don’t have accountability and transparency without records management.”

Lueders initially aired his concerns on his industry blog and social media several years ago.

He then sounded the alarm at @IBM, where he worked on a team selling records management software to the government.

Seeing that #IBM wouldn’t budge, Lueders filed a formal #WhistleblowerComplaint with the @DOD_IG in May 2017.

@IBM @DoD_IG In July 2017, Lueders submitted another #WhistleblowerComplaint to the Intelligence Community (IC) IG, but never heard back.

@IBM @DoD_IG Records that should be destroyed after a certain time are forensically deleted by the application so they can’t be recovered.

This should have been the case for a significant portion of the 21.5 million records stolen from the OPM beginning in 2015.

Records that shouldn’t be destroyed or altered are secured and made immutable if they are declared in the application.

This should have been the case with the emails of #LoisLerner, at the center of the controversy surrounding the #IRS’s targeting of conservative groups.

“You have the appearance [of records management] and you have the reality,” Prescott said. “That is not responsive to our republic.”

“Nobody…tested these solutions to see if they would really work in a production environment,” Lueders said. “And they don’t.”

The total cost to #Taxpayers after two decades of deploying the unviable records management software is hard to estimate, due in part to poor federal contract award record management.

According to Lueders, the tab easily could run into the billions.

But the true cost of the chaos caused by poor record-keeping could be exponentially greater.

In 2016, the @DoD_IG found that the #Pentagon had insufficient records to account for $6.5 trillion in expenses.

Beyond the money, records management failures have more tragic consequences.

The families of the victims of the 2017 Texas church massacre filed several lawsuits against the government, claiming that @USAirForce’s negligence allowed the killer to purchase the weapons.

The @USAirForce and the Air Force IG declined to answer a question on why a review of compliance with the DOD 5015.2 standard was omitted from the reports.

The @DeptofDefense, @USAirForce, and the Air Force IG declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

/END/