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Compliance: US Government Agencies Failing
While corportate America is strugging to come to terms with an alphabet soup of compliance regulations like SOX, HIPAA, GLBA and FISMA, agencies in the US government aren’t faring much better.
In a recent review of four of the largest agencies, the Government Accountability Office finds that most are not compliant with required records management policies. Chief culprits in the findings were senior government officials.
More than half of senior officials were not following email record retention policies. Emails weren’t being moved to document repositories that would allow others to search them or that could guarantee their long-term archival.
The agencies reviewed in the report include the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
The report reviewed the email management practices of the head of each of these agencies and also the practices of four of each of the agencies most senior officials. Not all of the agencies have yet implemented email record management systems, which of course, would complicate any sort of compliance.
Part of the problem is that email is being increasingly used for handling essential communication, and the nature of those emails makes them the equivalent of federal records. The Federal Records Act is quite explicit in how documents of records need to be managed and maintained. Without keeping these documents in a records management system, agencies will not be able to respond quickly to inquiries that might arise, such as those related to the Freedom of Information Act.
The problem seems to be widespread across many, if not most, government agencies. The White House has come under fire for shoddy record keeping and the deletion of millions of emails from government servers. A groups called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is now suing the White House.
With both corporations and government agencies struggling to come to terms with email archiving, one might expect that technology developments that can simplify compliance in this area will be closely watched over the coming months.
