Report: U.S. mismanaging e-records.

AuthorSwartz, Nikki
PositionUP FRONT - Electronic records - Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), one of the groups that has sued the White House over millions of "lost" e-mails, recently released a report--"Record Chaos: The Deplorable State of Electronic Record Keeping in the Federal Government"--concluding that the entire federal government is seriously mismanaging its electronic records*

The 42-page report resulted from Freedom of Information Act requests to various agencies to locate and produce e-mail messages and an online survey of 400 agency records managers with the assistance of OpenTheGovernment.org. CREW, a nonprofit legal watchdog group dedicated to holding public officials accountable, said the results reveal "an appalling lack of progress in moving toward electronic recordkeeping."

CREW's report says agencies "continue to cling to outdated, inefficient, and ineffective paper recordkeeping systems." The report found that the agencies' most common method of e-mail management was to print e-mail messages and store them. Only a few agencies surveyed exclusively used electronic systems to store e-mails.

The report goes so far as to say that the federal government has "fallen woefully behind its private-sector counterparts" and blames the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for failing to "affirmatively assist agencies in developing and implementing records management policies as the Federal Records Act requires."

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said, "The law requires the government to preserve federal records, which ultimately belong not to any single administration, but to the American people. These records, which often document serious policy matters, are being lost to future generations who might learn from them." Sloan continued, "In addition, those like CREW, who seek records from the government under the Freedom of Information Act or other statutes clearly are being deprived of those records, not necessarily due to malice, but rather incompetence."

Currently, federal agencies are free to choose how e-records and communications are to be preserved, according to CREW, which found that the Internal Revenue Service alone...

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