Get external auditors to come in and look at the system. Unless the data is corrupt, there is a way of getting it into a useful and queryable form. It would be a shame for this investigation to quietly die because of prevarication from some gifted bureaucrats.
It's not incompetence per se. They're buying time, either to get their tech chops together or just to prove they won't be ordered around. "It'll crash our computers" is enough to delay the next step, let's say at least six months before they have to provide anything.
Knowing what a lot of us know about "computers," they can get this together in (being nice) a week, leaving 5 3/4 months to compose their PR strategy dealing with the fallout.
Get external auditors to come in and look at the system. Unless the data is corrupt, there is a way of getting it into a useful and queryable form. It would be a shame for this investigation to quietly die because of prevarication from some gifted bureaucrats.