Federal Records: Agencies Face Challenges in Managing E-Mail
(23-APR-08, GAO-08-699T).
Federal agencies are increasingly using electronic mail (e-mail)
for essential communication. In doing so, they are potentially
creating messages that have the status of federal records, which
must be managed and preserved in accordance with the Federal
Records Act. To carry out the records management responsibilities
established in the act, agencies are to follow implementing
regulations that include specific requirements for e-mail
records. In view of the importance that e-mail plays in
documenting government activities, GAO was asked to testify on
issues relating to the preservation of electronic records,
including e-mail. As agreed, GAO's statement discusses challenges
facing agencies when managing their e-mail records, as well as
current policies and practices for managing e-mail messages that
qualify as federal records. This testimony is primarily based on
preliminary results of ongoing work, in which GAO is examining,
among other things, e-mail policies at four agencies of
contrasting sizes and structures (the Department of Homeland
Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Trade
Commission, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development),
as well as the practices of selected senior officials.
-------------------------Indexing Terms-------------------------
REPORTNUM: GAO-08-699T
ACCNO: A81699
TITLE: Federal Records: Agencies Face Challenges in Managing
E-Mail
DATE: 04/23/2008
SUBJECT: Agency proceedings
Data transmission
E-mail
Electronic records
Electronic records management
Federal agencies
Federal records management
Federal regulations
Government information
Information management
Information resources management
Information storage and retrieval
Policy evaluation
Records
Records management
Reporting requirements
Policies and procedures
******************************************************************
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** No attempt has been made to display graphic images, although **
** figure captions are reproduced. Tables are included, but **
** may not resemble those in the printed version. **
** **
** Please see the PDF (Portable Document Format) file, when **
** available, for a complete electronic file of the printed **
** document's contents. **
** **
******************************************************************
GAO-08-699T
* [1]Results in Brief
* [2]Background
* [3]NARA and Federal Agencies Have Responsibilities for Federal
* [4]Management of E-Mail Records Poses Challenges
* [5]Agency Policies on Preserving E-Mail Records Are Not Followe
* [6]Most Agency Policies Generally Complied with NARA Guidance
* [7]E-Mail Records of Senior Officials Were Not Consistently Pre
* [8]Recently Proposed Legislation on Electronic Records Manageme
* [9]Contacts and Acknowledgements
* [10]Ordering Information.pdf
* [11]Order by Mail or Phone
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Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and
National Archives, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:
United States Government Accountability Office:
GAO:
For Release on Delivery Expected at 2 P.M. EDT:
Wednesday, October 23, 2008:
Federal Records:
Agencies Face Challenges in Managing E-mail:
Statement of Linda Koontz, Director:
Information Management Issues:
GAO-08-699T:
GAO Highlights:
Highlights of GAO-08-699T, a testimony before the Subcommittee on
Information Policy, Census, and National Archives, Committee on
Oversight and Government Reform, House of Representatives.
Why GAO Did This Study:
Federal agencies are increasingly using electronic mail (e-mail) for
essential communication. In doing so, they are potentially creating
messages that have the status of federal records, which must be managed
and preserved in accordance with the Federal Records Act. To carry out
the records management responsibilities established in the act,
agencies are to follow implementing regulations that include specific
requirements for e-mail records. In view of the importance that e-mail
plays in documenting government activities, GAO was asked to testify on
issues relating to the preservation of electronic records, including e-
mail. As agreed, GAO�s statement discusses challenges facing agencies
when managing their e-mail records, as well as current policies and
practices for managing e-mail messages that qualify as federal records.
This testimony is primarily based on preliminary results of ongoing
work, in which GAO is examining, among other things, e-mail policies at
four agencies of contrasting sizes and structures (the Department of
Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal
Trade Commission, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development),
as well as the practices of selected senior officials.
GAO's Preliminary Findings:
E-mail, because of its nature, presents challenges to records
management. First, the information contained in e-mail records is not
uniform: it may concern any subject or function and document various
types of transactions. As a result, in many cases, decisions on which e-
mail messages are records must be made individually. Second, the
transmission data associated with an e-mail record�including
information about the senders and receivers of messages, the date and
time the message was sent, and any attachments to the messages�may be
crucial to understanding the context of the record.Third, a given
message may be part of an exchange of messages between two or more
people within or outside an agency, or even of a string (sometimes
branching) of many messages sent and received on a given topic. In such
cases, agency staff need to decide which message or messages should be
considered records and who is responsible for storing them in a
recordkeeping system. Finally, the large number of federal e-mail users
and high volume of e-mails increase the management challenge.
Preliminary results of GAO�s ongoing review of e-mail records
management at four agencies show that not all are meeting the
challenges posed by e-mail records. Although the four agencies� e-mail
records management policies addressed, with a few exceptions, the
regulatory requirements, these requirements were not always met for the
senior officials whose e-mail practices were reviewed. Each of the four
agencies generally followed a print and file process to preserve e-mail
records in paper-based recordkeeping systems, but for about half of the
senior officials, e-mail records were not being appropriately
identified and preserved in such systems. Instead, e-mail messages were
being retained in e-mail systems that lacked recordkeeping
capabilities. (Among other things, a recordkeeping system allows
related records to be grouped into classifications according to their
business purposes.) Unless they have recordkeeping capabilities, e-mail
systems may not permit easy and timely retrieval of groupings of
related records or individual records. Further, keeping large numbers
of record and nonrecord messages in e-mail systems potentially
increases the time and effort needed to search for information in
response to a business need or an outside inquiry, such as a Freedom of
Information Act request. Factors contributing to this practice were the
lack of adequate staff support and the volume of e-mail received. In
addition, agencies had not ensured that officials and their responsible
staff received training in recordkeeping requirements for e-mail. If
recordkeeping requirements are not followed, agencies cannot be assured
that records, including information essential to protecting the rights
of individuals and the federal government, is being adequately
identified and preserved.
To view the full product, including the scope and methodology, click on
[hyperlink, http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-08-699T]. For more
information, contact Linda Koontz at (202) 512-6240 or [email protected].
[End of section]
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:
I appreciate the opportunity to discuss critical issues surrounding the
federal government's management of electronic mail messages. As you are
aware, federal agencies are increasingly using electronic mail (e-mail)
for essential communication, and in doing so, they are potentially
creating messages that have the status of federal records. According to
the Federal Records Act,[Footnote 1] federal records are information in
whatever form that documents government functions, activities,
decisions, and other important transactions, and such records must be
managed and preserved in accordance with the act.[Footnote 2] As the
volume of federal e-mail grows, so does the challenge of managing
electronic records.
Under the act, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
has responsibilities for oversight and guidance of federal records
management, which includes management of e-mail records. Agencies also
have records management responsibilities, which as specified by NARA
include the responsibility to develop e-mail management policies and
practices that include specific requirements, such as defining staff
responsibilities for determining whether an e-mail (including any
associated attachments) is a federal record and, further, requiring
preservation of record e-mail.
As requested, my statement will focus on current practices used in
managing e-mail messages that qualify as federal records. After a brief
discussion of federal requirements, I will outline some of the
challenges facing agencies when managing their e-mail records and then
discuss e-mail records management policies and practices that we are
reviewing at four agencies. Finally, I will offer brief comments on
recently drafted legislation in this area.
In my statement today, my discussion of e-mail records management
challenges, policies, and practices is based on the preliminary results
of work we are doing at your and the full committee's request, which we
expect to publish later this year. For this engagement, we selected
four federal agencies based on contrasting sizes and structures and on
the significance of their records to protecting rights and documenting
accountability: 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). For
each agency, we are reviewing the e-mail management practices of four
senior officials (including the agency head),[Footnote 3] using
responses to a series of data collection instruments, interviews with
agency officials, and inspection of a limited number of sample e-mail
records identified by the agencies to corroborate their statements.
Also, to develop comments on the legislation, we analyzed the
provisions of the bill related to our ongoing work.
The ongoing performance audit on which my comments today are based,
which began in April 2007, is being conducted in accordance with
generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards
require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient,
appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and
conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence
obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions
based on our audit objectives.
Results in Brief:
E-mail, because of its nature, presents challenges to records
management. First, the information contained in e-mail records is not
uniform: it may concern any subject or function and document various
types of transactions. As a result, in many cases, decisions on which e-
mail messages are records must be made individually. Second, the
transmission data associated with an e-mail record--including
information about the senders and receivers of messages, the date and
time the message was sent, and any attachments to the messages--may be
crucial to understanding the context of the record. Third, a given
message may be part of an exchange of messages between two or more
people within or outside an agency, or even of a string (sometimes
branching) of many messages sent and received on a given topic. In such
cases, agency staff need to decide which message or messages should be
considered records and who is responsible for storing them in a
recordkeeping system. Finally, the large number of federal e-mail users
and high volume of e-mails increase the management challenge. According
to NARA, the use of e-mail results in more records being created than
in the past, as it often replaces phone conversations and face-to-face
meetings that might not have been otherwise recorded.
Our ongoing review of e-mail records management at four agencies
provides illustrations of these difficulties. In their e-mail records
management policies, the four agencies addressed, with a few
exceptions, the requirements that we identified in NARA's regulations.
However, for the senior officials whose practices we reviewed,
recordkeeping requirements for e-mail were not always met. Each of the
four agencies generally followed a print and file process to preserve e-
mail records in paper-based recordkeeping systems, but for about half
of the senior officials, e-mail records were not being appropriately
identified and preserved in such systems. Instead, e-mail messages,
including records, were generally being retained in e-mail systems that
lacked recordkeeping capabilities, which is contrary to regulation.
(Among other things, a recordkeeping system allows related records to
be grouped into classifications according to their business purposes.)
Unless they have recordkeeping features, e-mail systems may not permit
easy and timely retrieval of both groupings of related records as well
as individual records. Further, keeping large numbers of record and
nonrecord messages in e-mail systems potentially increases the time and
effort needed to search for information in response to a business need
or an outside inquiry, such as a Freedom of Information Act request.
Factors contributing to this practice were the lack of adequate staff
support and the volume of e-mail received. In addition, officials and
their responsible staff had not always received training in the
recordkeeping requirements for e-mail records. If recordkeeping
requirements are not followed, agencies cannot be assured that records,
including information that is essential to protecting the rights of
individuals and the federal government, is being adequately identified
and preserved.
The provisions of a draft bill (the Electronic Communications
Preservation Act) would mandate the transition to electronic records
management for e-mail records. Such a transition could help agencies
improve their recordkeeping practices in this area. As our review
shows, agencies recognize that devoting significant resources to
creating paper records from electronic sources is not a viable long-
term strategy and have accordingly begun to plan or implement such a
transition. The investment in information technology needed to
implement electronic recordkeeping will have to be managed
appropriately to avoid unnecessary cost and performance risks.
Accordingly, the bill's requirement that NARA develop minimum
functional requirements should reduce the development risk that could
result from multiple agencies concurrently developing similar systems.
Once implemented, however, electronic recordkeeping systems could
potentially help agencies obtain the efficiencies of automation and
avoid expenditure of resources on duplicative manual processes and
storage.
Background:
Advances in information technology and the explosion in computer
interconnectivity have had far-reaching effects, including the
transformation from a paper-based to an electronic business environment
and the capability for rapid communication through e-mail. Although
these developments have led to improvements in speed and productivity,
they also require the development of ways to manage information that is
increasingly in electronic rather than paper form. For federal
agencies, such information includes e-mail messages that may have the
status of federal records.
NARA and Federal Agencies Have Responsibilities for Federal Records
Management:
Under the Federal Records Act,[Footnote 4] each federal agency is
required to make and preserve records that (1) document the
organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential
transactions of the agency and (2) provide the information necessary to
protect the legal and financial rights of the government and of persons
directly affected by the agency's activities.[Footnote 5] These
records, which include e-mail records, must be effectively managed. If
they are not, individuals might lose access to benefits for which they
are entitled, the government could be exposed to unwarranted legal
liabilities, and historical records of vital interest could be lost
forever. In addition, agencies with poorly managed records risk
increased costs when attempting to search their records in response to
Freedom of Information Act requests or litigation-related discovery
actions.
Accordingly, agencies are required to develop records management
programs to ensure that they have appropriate recordkeeping systems
with which to manage and preserve their records. Among the activities
of a records management program are identifying records and sources of
records and providing records management guidance, including agency-
specific recordkeeping practices that establish what records need to be
created in order to conduct agency business. Agencies are also required
to schedule their records: that is, to identify and inventory records,
appraise their value, determine whether they are temporary or
permanent, and determine how long the temporary records should be kept.
The act also gives the National Archives and Records Administration
(NARA) responsibilities for oversight and guidance of federal records
management, which includes management of e-mail records. NARA works
with agencies to schedule records, and it must approve all records
schedules. Records schedules may be specific to an agency, or they may
be general, covering records common to several or all agencies.
According to NARA, records covered by general records schedules make up
about a third of all federal records. For the other two thirds, NARA
and the agencies must agree upon specific records schedules.
No record may be destroyed unless it has been scheduled. For temporary
records, the schedule is of critical importance, because it provides
the authority to dispose of the record after a specified time period.
(For example, General Records Schedule 1, Civilian Personnel Records,
provides instructions on retaining case files for merit
promotions;[Footnote 6] agencies may destroy these records 2 years
after the personnel action is completed, or after an audit by the
Office of Personnel Management, whichever is sooner.) Once a schedule
has been approved, the agency must issue it as a management directive,
train employees in its use, and apply its provisions to temporary and
permanent records.
NARA has issued regulations that specifically address the management of
e-mail records.[Footnote 7] As with other records, agencies are
required to establish policies and procedures that provide for
appropriate retention and disposition of e-mail records. NARA further
specified that for each e-mail record, agencies must preserve certain
transmission data--names of sender and addressees and message date.
Further, except for a limited category of "transitory" e-mail
records,[Footnote 8] agencies are not permitted to store the
recordkeeping copy of e-mail records in the e-mail system, unless that
system has certain features, such as the ability to group records into
classifications according to their business purposes and to permit easy
and timely retrieval of both individual records and groupings of
related records. These recordkeeping features are important to ensure
that e-mail records remain both accessible and usable during their
useful lives. For example, it is essential to be able to classify
records according to their business purpose so that they can be
retrieved in case of mission need. Further, if records cannot be
retrieved easily and quickly, or they are not retained in a usable
format, they do not serve the mission or historical purpose that led to
their being preserved. If agencies do not keep their e-mail records in
systems with the required capabilities, records may also be at
increased risk of loss from inadvertent or automatic deletion.
If agency e-mail systems do not have the required recordkeeping
features, either agencies must copy e-mail records to a separate
electronic recordkeeping system, or they must print e-mail messages
(including associated transmission information that is needed for
purposes of context) and file the copies in traditional paper
recordkeeping files. NARA's regulations allow agencies to use either
paper or electronic recordkeeping systems for record copies of e-mail
messages, depending on the agencies' business needs.
The advantages of using a paper-based system for record copies of e-
mails are that it takes advantage of the recordkeeping system already
in place for the agency's paper files and requires little or no
technological investment. The disadvantages are that a paper-based
approach depends on manual processes and requires electronic material
to be converted to paper, potentially losing some features of the
electronic original; such manual processes may be especially burdensome
if the volume of e-mail records is large.
The advantage of using an electronic recordkeeping system, besides
avoiding the need to manage paper, is that it can be designed to
capture certain required data (such as transmission data)
automatically.Electronic recordkeeping systems also make searches for
records on particular topics much more efficient. In addition,
electronic systems that are integrated with other applications may have
features that make it easier for the user to identify records, and
potentially could provide automatic or partially automatic
classification functions.[Footnote 9] However, as with other
information technology investments, acquiring an electronic
recordkeeping system requires careful planning and analysis of agency
requirements and business processes; in addition, electronic
recordkeeping raises the issue of maintaining electronic information in
an accessible form throughout its useful life.[Footnote 10]
Management of E-Mail Records Poses Challenges:
Because of its nature, e-mail can present particular challenges to
records management. First, the information contained in e-mail records
is not uniform: it may concern any subject or function and document
various types of transactions. As a result, in many cases, decisions on
which e-mail messages are records must be made individually. Second,
the transmission data associated with an e-mail record--including
information about the senders and receivers of messages, the date and
time the message was sent, and any attachments to the messages--may be
crucial to understanding the context of the record. Third, a given
message may be part of an exchange of messages between two or more
people within or outside an agency, or even of a string (sometimes
branching) of many messages sent and received on a given topic. In such
cases, agency staff need to decide which message or messages should be
considered records and who is responsible for storing them in a
recordkeeping system. Finally, the large number of federal e-mail users
and high volume of e-mails increase the management challenge. According
to NARA, the use of e-mail results in more records being created than
in the past, as it often replaces phone conversations and face-to-face
meetings that might not have been otherwise recorded.
These challenges have been recognized by NARA and the records
management community in numerous studies and articles.[Footnote 11] A
2001 survey of federal recordkeeping practices conducted by a
contractor for NARA concluded, among other things, that managing e-mail
was a major records management problem and that the quality of
recordkeeping varied considerably across agencies.[Footnote 12] In
addition, the study concluded that for many federal employees, the
concept of a "record" and what should be scheduled and preserved was
not clear.
A 2005 NARA-sponsored survey of federal agencies' policy and practices
for electronic records management concluded that procedures for
managing e-mail were underdeveloped.[Footnote 13] The study, performed
by the University of Maryland Center for Information Policy, stated
that most of the surveyed offices had not developed electronic
recordkeeping systems, but were instead maintaining recordkeeping
copies of e-mail and other electronic documents in paper format.
However, all of the offices also maintained electronic records
(frequently electronic duplicates of paper records). According to the
study team, the agencies did not establish electronic recordkeeping
systems due to financial constraints, and implementing such systems was
a considerable challenge that increased with the size of the agency. As
a result, organizations were maintaining unsynchronized parallel paper
and electronic systems, resulting in extra work, confusion regarding
which is the recordkeeping copy, and retention of many records beyond
their disposition date.
Most recently, a NARA study team examined in 2007 the experiences of
five federal agencies (including itself) with electronic records
management applications, with a particular emphasis on how these
organizations used these applications to manage e-mail.[Footnote 14]
The purpose of the study was to gather information on the strategies
that organizations are using that may be useful to others. Among the
major conclusions from the survey was that implementing an electronic
records management application requires considerable effort in
planning, testing, and implementation, and that although the
functionality of the software product itself is important, other
factors are also crucial, including agency culture, training provided,
and management and information technology support. With regard to e-
mail in particular, the survey concluded that e-mail messages can
constitute the most voluminous type of record that is filed into
records management applications.
Agency Policies on Preserving E-Mail Records Are Not Followed
Consistently:
Our work on e-mail records management demonstrates that agencies
continue to face challenges similar to those identified by the prior
studies. While our results are preliminary and we are not able to
project them beyond the agencies we reviewed, I believe they help
illustrate the difficulties agencies can face when applying NARA's
requirements to today's operating environment.
Most Agency Policies Generally Complied with NARA Guidance:
Three of the four agencies we reviewed--FTC, DHS, and EPA--had policies
in place that generally complied with NARA's guidance on how to
identify and preserve e-mail records, but each was missing one
applicable requirement. Specifically, the policies at EPA and FTC did
not instruct staff on the management and preservation of e-mail records
sent or received from nongovernmental e-mail systems (such as
commercial Web-based systems). Both EPA and FTC officials told us that
these instructions were not provided because the staff were informed
that use of outside e-mail systems for official business was
prohibited. However, whenever access to such external systems is
available at an agency, providing these instructions is still required.
DHS's policy did not specify that draft documents circulated via e-mail
may be federal records. DHS officials recognized that their policies
did not specifically address the need to assess the records status of
draft documents, and said they planned to address the omission during
an ongoing effort to revise the policies.
The policy at one of the four agencies, HUD, was missing three of eight
applicable requirements.[Footnote 15] One element of the policy was
inconsistent with NARA's regulation: it required only the sender of an
e-mail message to review it for potential records status, but the
regulation states that e-mail records could include both messages sent
or received. HUD officials acknowledged that its policy omits the
recipient's responsibility for determining the record status of e-mail
messages and stated that its e-mail policy fell short of fully
implementing NARA regulations in this regard because the department's
practice is not to use e-mail for business matters in which official
records would need to be created. However, this practice does not
remove the requirement for agency employees to assess e-mail received
for its record status, because the agency cannot know that employees
will not receive e-mail with record status; the determination of record
status depends on the content of the information, not its medium.
In addition, two other requirements were missing from HUD's policy: it
did not state, as required, that recordkeeping copies of e-mail should
not be stored in e-mail systems and that backup tapes should not be
used for recordkeeping purposes. HUD officials stated that they
considered that these requirements were met by a reference in their
policy to the NARA regulations in which these requirements
appear.[Footnote 16] However, this reference is not sufficient to make
clear to staff that e-mail systems and backup tapes are not to be used
for recordkeeping.
E-Mail Records of Senior Officials Were Not Consistently Preserved:
While agency policies were generally compliant with recordkeeping
regulations, these policies were not applied consistently.
Specifically, for 8 of the 15 senior officials we reviewed, e-mail
messages that qualified as records were not being appropriately
identified and preserved. Instead, the officials generally kept every
message within their e-mail systems. Each of the four agencies
generally followed a print and file process to preserve e-mail records
in paper-based recordkeeping systems because their e-mail systems did
not have required record-keeping capabilities. Factors contributing to
this lack of compliance with recordkeeping requirements were the lack
of adequate staff support and the volume of e-mail received--several of
these officials had thousands or even tens of thousands of messages in
their e-mail system accounts. Another reason was that keeping every e-
mail ensured that no information was lost, which was seen as safe from
a legal standpoint. However, by keeping every message, they were
potentially increasing the time and effort that would be needed to
search through and review all the saved messages in response to an
outside inquiry, such as a Freedom of Information Act request. In
addition, by not keeping the e-mail in an appropriate recordkeeping
system, these officials were making it more difficult for their
agencies to find information by subject. Appropriately identifying and
saving record material also allows agencies to avoid expending
resources on unnecessarily preserving nonrecord material and on keeping
record material beyond its usefulness (that is, beyond the date when it
can be disposed of according to the records schedule).
In contrast, many of the officials whose e-mail records were
appropriately managed delegated responsibility for this task to one or
more administrative staff members. These individuals were responsible
for identifying which e-mail messages qualified as records and ensuring
that the message and any attachments were preserved according to the
agency's records management policies. Generally, this required that
they print the message, including any attachments and transmission
information (who the message was to and from and when it was sent), and
place the paper copy in a file.
Printing and filing copies of e-mail records is acceptable under NARA's
regulations. However, printing copies of e-mails can lead to an agency
maintaining multiple copies of the message in both paper and electronic
formats, which can lead to agencies' expending resources on duplicative
storage, as well as confusion over which is the recordkeeping copy.
Further, as with all electronic documents, conversion to paper entails
the risk of losing some features of the electronic original.
Awareness of federal records requirements is also an ongoing concern.
At one department, training for senior officials on their records
management responsibilities took place only at the beginning of the
current administration. Officials who joined the department
subsequently were not trained on records management. Similarly, several
administrative staff responsible for managing the e-mail of senior
officials told us that they had not been trained to recognize a record.
Recently Proposed Legislation on Electronic Records Management:
A draft bill, the Electronic Communications Preservation Act, would
mandate agencies to transition to electronic records management by
requiring the Archivist of the United States to promulgate regulations
governing agency preservation of electronic communications that are
federal records. Among other things, the regulations would:
* require the electronic capture, management, and preservation of these
records;
* require that such electronic records are readily accessible for
retrieval through electronic searches; and:
* require the Archivist to develop mandatory minimum functional
requirements for electronic records management applications to meet the
first two requirements.
* The legislation would also require agencies to comply with the new
regulations within 4 years of enactment.
Requiring a governmentwide transition to electronic recordkeeping
systems could help federal agencies improve e-mail management. For
example, storing e-mail records in an electronic repository could make
them easier to search and potentially speed agency responses to Freedom
of Information Act requests. As our review shows, agencies recognize
that devoting significant resources to creating paper records from
electronic sources is not a viable long-term strategy and have
accordingly begun to plan or implement such a system. The 4-year
deadline in the draft bill could help expedite this transition.
In addition, the development of minimum functional requirements by NARA
should reduce the development risk that could have resulted from
multiple agencies concurrently developing similar systems. By providing
time both for standards to be developed and implemented by agencies,
these provisions recognize the need for a well-planned process. Like
any investment in information technology, the development of electronic
recordkeeping systems will have to be carefully managed to avoid
unnecessary cost and performance risks. However, once implemented, such
systems could potentially provide the efficiencies of automation and
avoid the expenditure of resources on duplicative manual processes and
storage.
In summary, the increasing use of e-mail is resulting in records
management challenges for federal agencies. For example, the large
number of federal e-mail users and the high volume of e-mails present
challenges, particularly in the current paper-based environment. While
agency e-mail policies generally contained required elements, about
half of the senior officials we reviewed were not following these
policies and were instead maintaining their e-mail messages within
their e-mail accounts, where records cannot be efficiently searched,
are not accessible to others who might need the information in the
records, and are at increased risk of loss. Several agencies are
considering developing electronic recordkeeping systems, but until such
systems are implemented, agencies may have reduced assurance that
information that is essential to protecting the rights of individuals
and the federal government is being adequately identified and
preserved.
Mr. Chairman, this concludes my testimony today. I would be happy to
answer any questions you or other members of the subcommittee may have.
Contacts and Acknowledgements:
If you have any questions concerning this testimony, please contact
Linda Koontz, Director, Information Management Issues, at (202) 512-
6240, or [email protected]. Other individuals who made key contributions
to this testimony were Timothy Case, Barbara Collier, Jennifer Stavros-
Turner, and James Sweetman.
[End of section]
Footnotes:
[1] 44 U.S.C. chapters 21, 29, 31, and 33.
[2] The definition of a record is given at 44 U.S.C. 3301.
[3] According to agency officials, the head of DHS did not have an e-
mail account or use e-mail for agency business; accordingly, we
reviewed the practices of 15 senior officials.
[4] 44 U.S.C. chapters 21, 29, 31, and 33.
[5] 44 U.S.C. 3101.
[6] That is, records relating to the promotion of an individual that
document qualification standards, evaluation methods, selection
procedures, and evaluations of candidates.
[7] 36 CFR Part 1234.24.
[8] These are e-mail records with very short-term (180 days or less)
NARA-approved retention periods (under the authority of General Record
Schedule 23, Item 7, or a NARA-approved agency records schedule).
Agencies may elect to manage such records on the e-mail system itself,
without the need to copy the record to a recordkeeping system, provided
that (1) users do not delete the messages before the expiration of the
NARA-approved retention period, and (2) the system's automatic deletion
rules ensure preservation of the records until the expiration of the
NARA-approved retention period.
[9] According to Gartner Research, "What enterprises really need (and
want), is a mechanism that automatically classifies messages by records
management type � without user intervention." However, such technology
is "in its infancy," as of August 2007, although the company expected
it to mature rapidly because of high demand. Gartner Research, Best
Practices in Records Management: FAQs, G00149526 (Aug. 17, 2007).
[10] That is, if the hardware, software, or media required to access
the information become obsolete or deteriorate, the information must be
migrated to hardware, software, or media that continue to be
accessible.
[11] For example, Robert F. Williams and Lori J. Ashley, Cohasset
Associates Inc., 2005 Electronic Records Management Survey--A Renewed
Call to Action, Cohasset/ARMA/AIIM White Paper (2005) Giovanna
Patterson and J. Timothy Sprehe, "Principal Challenges Facing
Electronic Records Management in Federal Agencies Today," Government
Information Quarterly, Vol. 19, (2002), pp 307-315; available at
[hyperlink, http://www.sciencedirect.com].
[12] SRA International, Inc., Report on Current Recordkeeping Practices
within the Federal Government, a report sponsored by NARA (Dec. 10,
2001), [hyperlink, http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/pdf/report-on-
recordkeeping-practices.pdf].
[13] Center for Information Policy/College of Information Studies/
University of Maryland, Best Practices in Electronic Records
Management: A Survey and Report on Federal Government Agency's
Recordkeeping Policies and Practices, a report sponsored by NARA (Dec.
19, 2005), [hyperlink, http://www.archives.gov/records-
mgmt/initiatives/umd-survey.html].
[14] NARA, A Survey of Federal Agency Records Management Applications
2007 (Jan. 22, 2008), [hyperlink, http://www.archives.gov/records-
mgmt/resources/rma-study-07.pdf].
[15] The requirement to instruct staff on the management and
preservation of official messages sent or received in non-governmental
e-mail systems was not applicable at HUD, which has implemented
technical controls to prevent access to such e-mail systems.
[16] Under Electronic Mail Database Management, Record Retention
Responsibilities, the HUD Electronic Mail Policy states that "Records
created or received on electronic mail systems must be managed in
accordance with the provisions of 36 CFR 1220, 1222, and 1228."
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