On September 4, 2009, the SEC’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) released its Report of Investigation regarding the agency’s failure to uncover Bernard Madoff’s long-running Ponzi scheme. The OIG’s Report concluded that this failure was due to “Systematic breakdowns in the manner in which the SEC conducted its examinations and investigations.” The OIG had discovered that emails sent to, from or within the SEC, crucial to the OIG’s ability to perform a thorough investigation, were missing for a number of reasons, including failures to back up tapes; hardware and software malfunctions which occurred during the backup process; and lost, mislabeled or corrupted tapes. These missing emails threatened to derail the investigation. The agency then retained First Advantage Litigation Consulting to lead the effort to restore and produce the missing electronic data.
Our team consulted with the OIG to understand how the SEC’s email exchange and file servers were configured and how backup procedures operated during the time period relevant to the investigation. We then provided technical support to identify and recover relevant electronic data from the SEC’s inventory of backup tapes and the online enterprise archive system that the agency adopted in 2008 to store copies of emails. According to the Report, First Advantage Litigation Consulting “was able to successfully preserve and restore potentially responsive data…and coordinated the restoration of SEC electronic records identified by the OIG as relevant to our investigation.”
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