Document Retention - How Long is Too Long? 405
darthtuttle asks: "With
the recent news of document destruction at Enron and the emails that have
been discovered in high profile cases such as MS -vs- DOJ document
retention seems to be a hot item right now. What document retention policies
do people have at their companies, and what steps do companies take to
make sure that documents are destroyed according to the policy when their
time is up so they don't come back to haunt the company later? Note: the
purpose of a document retention policy is not to keep documents, but to
make sure they get destroyed according to policy before someone outside
the company decides to use it against you. The big issues seems to be
backups and documents stored on peoples desktop/laptops. You don't
want those email server backup tapes from 2 years ago to be found, and
you don't want to find out that the CFO was saving -every- email they
ever got on their laptop."
According to Arthur Andersen's Employee Handbook (Score:4, Funny)
The Samuel Goldwyn rule (Score:2, Funny)
Go ahead but just make sure you make copies of everything first
Re:According to Arthur Andersen's Employee Handboo (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm surprised at the question though. Are companies really so worried about their business practices that they must destroy evidence in order to remove liability? I should imagine that internal auditors would be more effective at keeping a company out of trouble than any policy of document destruction.
Re:According to Arthur Andersen's Employee Handboo (Score:2, Interesting)
I am guessing you have never worked as an internal auditor or known someone who worked as an internal auditor. They don't typically review accounting policies. They are more procedure oriented.
Even if the internatl auditors did know about this problem, they would have just reported to the board of directors who most likely would have filed the report in the cabinet with the sharp cutting teeth.
The plantiff's lawyers went back to 1937 notes... (Score:3, Interesting)
fast forward to 1985, the press made back in 1937 is still in use at some rundown plant staffed with illegal mexicans, it has not had any decent maintenance in decades and of course all the operator guards were removed to speed up production several owners ago.
some guy puts his hands in the danger zone and the press gets him.
the original company that made the press 48 years ago gets bagged on the grounds that they knew it was a dangerous machine that's why they mounted operator guards on it... the fact that persons unknown decades later removed those guards and no one trained the illegals on safe operation of this old rundown press was beside the point...
being an old family run company, they had records dating back to the founding apparently they never threw anything away and minutes from a 1937 meeting ended up costing them a couple of millions of $.
if the law or regulatory agency does not explictly require you keep the stuff, shred it as soon as you can, wipe the backup tapes as soon as possible and keep only the stuff you have to, the shortest time permitted.
reimage the corp laptops every 6 months to prevent packrat ceo's from keeping every email and their kids who use it at home to surf p0rn sites when dad isn't watching...
Re:Oh come on.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Please, try not to be a complete fucking idiot. Everybody else already has a clue [consumerrights.net].
Re:According to Arthur Andersen's Employee Handboo (Score:3, Insightful)
There's another side to this too, kids. As someone who does expert testimony in cases involving data stored on personal computers, I can tell you that every individual also has a need for data control measures. Every one of us needs to shred documents, delete files, and scrub file slack space and "empty" space on our disks. Windoze users should also scrub out their swapfiles.
These are realities imposed upon us by the nanny state, which has grown a lot bigger since 9/11.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
Re:Actually being a Former Andersen Employee (Score:3, Insightful)
Why the hell not? What happened to self auditing? What happened to rules in regulations that they are to follow to prevent this kind of major scandal?
Let me tell you - if company employees break the law for the company, it's still the company that's breaking the law. Heads should roll - and gross mismanagement should result in long, long prison terms for Andersen management.
Why hire Andersen if they don't even have a handle on how well their working with one of their biggest clients???
Depends (not the adult diaper) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Depends (not the adult diaper) (Score:3, Funny)
I'm having a hard time deciding if you're referring back to your subject line with that one...
nothing to hide (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:nothing to hide (Score:2)
Re:nothing to hide (Score:3, Interesting)
Document files are a little more difficult. Everyone is encouraged to store files on the server in secure folders. This is enforced culturally because if a hard drive fails and the user wants data back, they are told it should have been on the server where it is backed-up (and deleted at the appropriate time).
BTW, these procedures have proven very important as the company has defended itself in against anti-competitive suits as well as race-discrimination suits.
Re:nothing to hide (Score:2)
The problem isn't that simple, normally. In any organization of some size, there will be embarrassing documents floating around: created on demand from the CEO, or by a rogue employee, these things will happen. Multiply this by years and years, and you end up with the potential for massive problems if they are discovered.
Go look up some of your old Usenet posts on Google Groups... you'll see some and say, "wow, I was a real idiot then." It's the same principle, different scale when you're dealing with a company with 50K employees.
What's your credit card number (Score:2)
And your mother's maiden name, while you're at it. And your home address, SSN, birth certificate.
Nothing to hide, right?
Oh, and that letter you wrote to your realtor telling him the absolute lowest price you would accept for the house you're selling. I'm in the market for a new house and I could really use that information.
Besides, you have nothing to hide.
Re:What's your credit card number (Score:2)
Real World Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
You should be careful not to fall into the logical trap that document destruction is only useful if you have something to hide. In this very litigious society, it's rarely that simple.
Virg
So you're against personal encryption too? (Score:2, Interesting)
There are issues which were "legitimate" at the time, but later came back to haunt them. GE and the PCBs in the upper Hudson is one. Corning and silicon breast implants are another. Abestos. Lead based paints. Did these companies wish they hadn't destroyed all those documents from scientists saying their products/actions were safe? Or did they end up destroying the "bad" evidence for plausible deniability?
Business destroy documents for lots of reasons. I think it's mostly so CEOs can take a stand and have "plausible deniability" to protect their asses. Luckily, there are always backups somewhere that will come back to haunt them.
Re:nothing to hide (Score:2, Insightful)
A document retention policy might also be advisable for the additional reason that it's not a good idea to have documents lying around when both the authors and recipients are long gone from the company (perhaps even deceased), and no one at the company understands what the documents mean or why they were prepared. At that point, there's no benefit to retaining the documents: they can serve only as potential ammunition for an adversary in a lawsuit. An adversary can draw erroneous inferences even from innocently prepared documents, and if you can't put the author on the witness stand to say, "That's not what I meant," what do you do?
(Note that so-called "ancient" documents -- which in federal court means documents more than 20 years old, see Fed. R. Evid. 803(16) [cornell.edu] -- are ordinarily admissible as evidence just like testimony from an eyewitness even though they are hearsay.)
Assuming you are legit... (Score:2)
However, and from the sounds of things, someone there wants some info to go away
The company I work for does insurance claims. We have paper trails all the way back to the early 80's, and backups of EVERYTHING from around 95 on. The premise here is that if it is important then, chances are decent that it could be again someday.
hthal
Premature discussion (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I think that corps shouldn't be allowed to destroy documents for at least 3-5 years -- all they're doing is covering their sins. Enron's a good example; they're destroying the evidence that they knew they were perpetrating a fraud against their investors. Destruction of the documents could mean that, as usual, the little guys get screwed and assholes like Ken Lay walk due to lack of evidence.
Pretty disgusting.
Presumption of Guilt (Score:3, Insightful)
The theory is simple and precedence is well-established - if a cop sees you see him then bolt, that's grounds for a reasonable presumption that you're guilty of *something* and the cops can stop and question you. It's not enough to throw you in jail, but you can be stopped and questioned while the guy who didn't flinch walks.
Same thing here - if you're deleting records that the state says you need to keep for N months, the burden in civil court (which only requires a "preponderance" of evidence anyway - 51%) is on you to prove that those documents weren't "smoking gun" evidence in support of the plantiff's case, not on them to prove they were.
If you're deleting records despite a lawful order, you have to prove that the documents were not incrimidating and that it didn't constitute obstruction of justice or contempt of court.
Of course this is something that would have to be handled on a case-by-case basis already... but the courts already do this when deciding admissibility of evidence discrediting a witness. If somebody has been convicted of perjury, the jury should know it because it's reasonable to ask whether they're lying again. If somebody has been shredding documents when they shouldn't have been, that again directly challenges their credibility elsewhere.
They already broke existing law (Score:2)
Re:Premature discussion (Score:2)
I think what's happening to Andersen now might be a deterant, at least in the short run, to some of these other accounting firms -- all these guys have is reputation, so when it's exposed that they're dirty it hurts their biz... I almost expect that the next big corporate failure Andersen will be involved with will be their own.
I'm very glad to have saved everything ... (Score:2, Informative)
The solution is simple (Score:2, Interesting)
Your Solution is Oversimple (Score:4, Insightful)
In the corporate world, lawsuits complicate such issues immensely. Don't make the mistake of assuming that the only reason to cover your butt is because you've done something wrong.
Virg
See your lawyers, and hurry (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously -- if you don't check with the legal types on what the information is and what it relates to, you could be legally liable for obstruction of justice/personal harm. The lecture I got on this turned my hair curly. Make the lawyers earn their money and break down what you can and can't destory, and when. If you've got any kind of assets to protect, this is a must.
-- q
Re:See your lawyers, and hurry (Score:2)
The other side. (Score:2, Insightful)
If you destroy a document, then the other side makes a statement, it would be hard for you do show proof that the statement is false, because you destroyed your evidence.
Tax documents (Score:2)
If you knowingly destroy evidence of a crime, even on someone else's orders, you've just committed Obstruction of Justice, and possibly Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice. Those are what all the Watergate conspriators went to jail for.
Big Holes Electronically (Score:2)
My large organization is probably a lot like many others.
We have a fairly extensive policy for managing records that has been developed over decades in a world dominated by paper.
There has been some effort to extend those policies into the electronic arena as well.
But I think the sheer volume of electronic records is making the certain impracticalities of those policies show.
Things like having people periodically review material and decide what to keep and what to archive and what to destroy - this requires more human time than any reasonable person is willing to commit. And, if the corporation thinks about the real costs of having a live human review those e-documents, they'll probably come to the same conclusion.
And I won't even mention the complications of moss-covered media that has stuff on it that no one has really inventoried carefully.
I have 8mm tapes from 7-8 years ago that I haven't looked at. There's several GB of stuff on it, but even I couldn't tell you what it all is.
It's probably includes the 12 page document that Oliver North faxed to me about the impending Enron collapse that was initiated by the Whitewater deal. 8)
Honest Business Practices and Copyright (Score:2)
Looking at it from another point of view, all of those documents are automatically protected under copyright. Copyright is an agreement between creators and the public - the creator gets an exclusive right to use the work for a time but then it belongs to the public domain. All of those destroyed documents are a form of theft from the public!
A radical suggestion (Score:2)
Re:A radical suggestion (Score:3, Informative)
Technological demands (Score:3, Informative)
Sometime today I plan to decomission the Netware backup system -- derack the equipment and potentially reuse it in some other location as soon as next week. This will make all of our old backup tapes unreadbale, as our Win2k backup system uses not just different software but different physical media -- I can't read DLT7000 on a LTO Ultrium tape drive. I *think* I can read an ArcServe tape on BE 8.6, but the files are backed up as Netware-compressed and can't be restored but to a netware server. Once we decomission our last netware server (within a few months), all of those tapes are worthless without the infrastructure to restore the data.
The email system again is another matter, I need even more infrastructure and software to manage it (presuming I can restore it). Netware administrator, Groupwise installed (client and server), and so on.
Even so, we don't even keep old backup tapes. We have a 5 week rotation (1 full per week with daily incrementals). I used to keep old tapes, but they were unreliable (especially the DATs) and the software isn't always available. We USED to keep them (1 full per month), but I found myself with a shitpile of tapes that needed storing and a big blank media bill.
Eventually word/powerpoint and other apps will obsolete themselves to where the data, even if you can read the media, isn't usable. I know that we purge our email system daily of older > 6 months emails and we chase after users to ditch old documents as server space gets tight.
I can't imagine the tech demands of constant archiving of everything. I'd need to give half of my budget to EMC just to try to stay ahead.
Re:Technological demands (Score:5, Insightful)
This is partly because you don't use standards compliant systems. I have all my non-junk e-mail going back to 1994 saved, from a variety of HP, Solaris, Irix and Linux machines across maybe nine e-mails. It's all in instantly recognizable mbox format. If you are going to go with Netware, Win2k, etc. Then of course you are going to have these problems! The companies that make those systems make their profits selling new versions of software.
Maybe it would save your company money to choose a system which does not build in 2 year obsolescence into its business plan.
What you all are missing. (Score:5, Insightful)
To me, the best policy is whatever your legal requirements are and that's it. Destroy everything else.
Re:What you all are missing. (Score:3, Informative)
Another poster further down made a good point - you either hang on to every document, forever, or you discard some of them. As soon as you discard or destroy anything, there's a question of why you did so. Was it because you had no further use for the document in question, or because you had something to hide?
Document retention policies help answer that question. If your company policy is to destroy electronic copies of anything more than 12 months old, then when you end up in court and someone asks you "Why don't you have these documents any longer? Perhaps they were destroyed because they were incriminating evidence, hmm?!?" you can honestly tell them "I have no idea. Company policy is that anything older than 12 months gets erased, so we shredded the backup tapes 3 years ago."
Re:What you all are missing. (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, documents can be useful to the company itself. While for the most part, you are innocent until proven guilty and thus less evidence is better, a document can provide evidence of any number of things that the company would want to keep. For instance, employee theft, that someone independently created something before or in parrallel with another company, etc.
Also, you should be honest about who you are protecting. Are you protecting the company, or some of the employees of the company? Enron's destruction of evidence does not seem to be to protect the company. The company is nearly dead, and the company is made up of the shareholders, not the executives. Any document destruction at this point is clearly not to the benefit of the company.
Come on now (Score:2)
We keep hearing the "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about" argument in all media formats, especially slashdot. Shouldn't this apply to corporations and government agencies as well? The proper way for the Feds to handle Enron would have been to send in armed agents to sieze hard drives and filing cabinets, rather than give them months to destroy everything. The same policy should be applied to Cheney's handling of his dirty oil company dealings. The same should have been applied to the Reagan/Bush administration during the Iran/Contra days. This biased application of forceful seizure of evidence has our prisons full of private citizens while crooked pols and crooked execs stroll around in search of their next scam.
If you need a Document Retention policy for any reason other than reducing storage space, it's time to check your ethics.
Gratuitous "balance" (Score:2)
... Cheney
... Reagan/Bush
Clinton! Whitewater!
Clinton! Chinese campaign financing!
Okay, move along, nothing to see here.
Re:Come on now (Score:2)
Speak for yourself... (Score:2, Informative)
One of the biggest reasons in the business world (other than CYA) to destroy documents is due to space requirements. Ten years worth of paper trail can easily take up a small warehouse. With the advent of computer based storage, though, it is much more practical to keep comprehensive records for much longer lengths of time.
Hard problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Once you convince a company that document "retention" is valuable, many managers will immediately declare themselves exempt because they feel that they will one day need that email from a vendor thanking them for buying the Widget 10,000 last week.
What I think the industry really needs is some kind of software that manages information archives in a way that lets people specifically call out information that needs to be preserved as annotation. In this way, you could keep all of the headers of all of the mail and all of the filenames of all of the documents on a fileserver, but only keep the annotations (which may include some key points from an original).
I know that I would find this more useful than the usual way that people annotate documents (named folders).
Re:Hard problem (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a major policy problem in a much wider scope than a document retention/destruction policy. The problem of politically powerful individuals within a company declaring themselves exempt from various policies is a serious one. Ask any systems administrator about it - when you come up with any policy and present it at a meeting, everyone will approve it and say it sounds like a great idea. Later, each person will individually approach you and say that the policy is a great idea for everyone else but the he'she should personally be exempt because of some special circumstance or other that, of course, doesn't apply to anyone else.
If your company is like that (that is, it's like mine), don't even bother with written policies, on document retention or anything else. Even if you own the company or are the CEO and thus powerful enough to force the approval of policies like this, nobody will actually follow them anyway. Your best bet is probably to institute some boilerplate policy you get from your corporate lawyers, post it conspicuously, and make sure everyone agrees to it in writing. As I said, there's no point in trying to make anyone follow it - they won't. But in this case at least you can try to offload all liability on the individual employees who don't bother to follow the policy. It probably won't work especially in the case of SEC troubles or similar, but it's easy and cheap to do.
Honestly, why can't people just accept that they're NOT special?
Got something to cover? (Score:2, Troll)
"I'm making profit by breaking or flexing the law to such extent that my business would not survive the lighting in a courtroom. I know this is immoral. To further improve my profits, I wish to know what a good balance between keeping mails for reference and deleting mails for protection is. Do I keep compromising information for a few months? A year?"
Folks - give your worst advice possible.
Re:Got something to cover? (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's say that your company has done nothing wrong, but the SEC thinks that you might have been leaking information to financial institutions, in order to affect your stock price.
That's a pretty serious charge, but if you're innocent you have nothing to worry about, right? Well, it turns out that you have an employee that sent a seemingly innocent comment to his friend at such a company, but now, in light of the charges, it could be seen as an indication that such activity did exist and widen the investigation. This costs you in terms of legal expenses, time, credibility, etc.
Having old documents taken out of context can be truly damning, and it's just not worth the expense. Much better to destroy what could be used against you later.
Re:Got something to cover? (Score:2, Insightful)
yeh you right! (Score:2)
That's why honest companies save the context!
Don't even need that much of a problem (Score:4, Informative)
You don't even need that much of a "real" issue for this to become an expensive litigation. I once worked for a law firm. (IANAL, no sensitive info coming out here) We represented one of the parties in a patent infringement suit. Just documenting and sorting the contents of a couple of dozen employees' hard drives -- in order to determine what needed to be provided in the discovery phase -- took a team of three people over a week. If you end up in litigation, someone has to go through everything to see what is covered under "all documents or materials relating to
Re:Got something to cover? (Score:4, Informative)
This firm had nothing to hide, but was still burned badly by a poorly thought out document retention policy. Needless to say, they have since changed policies.
Please note that my friend had just taken over the IT department when this happened. He was not the individual suing.
Re:Got something to cover? (Score:2)
Not at all (Score:4, Informative)
If you aren't legally required to maintain records of every email/document/etc, then why SHOULD you? Do you recall the Netscape [jwz.org] fiasco where Microsoft subpoenad the history of every email to an employee bitch newsgroup? In that case Netscape had no legal duty to maintain backups and records of every posting, but because they made the mistake of not deleting them frequently suddenly they were required to provide them and were then barred from destroying them: It's an odd circumstance when you don't legally have to archive information, but if someone asks for it then suddenly it's legally protected and you have to defend and explain the context of every message, every word, etc, and of course everyone says something now and then that can be taken out of context (or alternately that they said in the heat of passion but backed down from).
Destroying old information quite simply removes the liability that it potentially represents, even if there is absolutely nothing indicting in it. It can also protect freedoms: Websites aren't legally required to keep IP logs, but if they DO then those IP logs can be subpoenad.
Logical fallacy (Score:2)
In a society that presumes innocence, you shouldn't even need to provide counter-examples. But here goes: docs are expensive to store and extremely expensive to retrieve and review even if totally innocent or even exculpatory. Docs are often requested for a fishing expedition unrelated to the complaint. Docs can be misread and misused by attorneys who are by definition extremely partisan.
I dunno, it all seems backward (Score:2, Interesting)
Certainly, there's a lot of stuff that isn't bad, but it can be viewed as bad in the context of history.. Lawrence Lessig got in trouble when he was appointed as Special Master in the Microsoft case because of an e-mail he wrote regarding the ease of installation (or lack thereof) of Netscape versus Internet Explorer, and the trouble installing the software caused..
It was just a silly e-mail to a friend, but it got blown out of proportion.
On the other hand, there have been instances in the past of very important and incriminating documents being kept by employees who felt that twinge of conscience and decided they shouldn't go in the shredder.
Document retention policies, in my opinion, should be based around keeping `important' documents (however that is defined), and shredding the lesser ones, in order to save space. No need to keep the e-mail regarding today's lunch outing, but it's a good idea to keep that list of patients...
An excellent example of why to destroy documents (Score:2, Informative)
No set answer (Score:2)
It depends on what the regulations say governing a particular record type.
DOL, IRS, DOT, OSHA, EPA, etc. all have their own requirements for record retention times.
Probably the best thing anyone/business can do is discern what these are and keep only these items along with any record that's pertinent after time. But fulfilling legal recordkeeping requirements should be the top priority in such a review.
Equally Important (Score:2)
There is a legal principle called spoliation, which is a $5 word for destroying evidence. You can find that the mere fact you destroyed something hurts much more than whatever was in the document would have hurt.
You need a system! (Score:2, Interesting)
The U.S Army uses a system called MARKS (Modern Army Recordkeeping System) [army.mil] which includes destruction procedures. Every record within the MARKS system is supposed to have a disposition which indicates when it is to be destroyed. The system is designed so that there is no ambiguity about when to destroy the file (e.g., "destroy 1 year after expiration"). Any half-awake clerk can follow the instructions.
Usually the person creating the document knows it's proper scope, and can specify the disposition. Then anyone who receives the file just follows the instructions.
Necessary for any similar system for private companies would be
1) publish guidelines/SOPs/regulations for dispositions
2) make sure document authors specify destruction dispositions on all documents
3) publish SOPs for regularly purging documents
4) auditing to make sure that destruction dispositions are followed
The best way would to be to have some automation in there -- document creation tools modified to automatically insert this information, automated purging, automated auditing. Otherwise you're just adding a lot of workload to people who probably don't give a flying f--- about document destruction.
Here's a good rule of thumb. (Score:2)
That being said, if the penalties for obstruction of justice are less than that of the crime being committed then of course it's a good idea to destroy them immediately. It's just not legal to.
So, if you commit a crime and it's minor then save the evidence until the statue of limitations is up. If it's a major crime then you will possibly get in less trouble if all the evidence is destroyed immediately. Just remember that crimes tend to be cumulative so, for example, you could be convicted of both robbery and obstruction of justice and get a longer jail time or more penalties than if you never destroyed the evidence.
Document Retention (Score:2, Informative)
First off, one of the poster's arguments is a bit flawed. The poster states that the purpose of a document retention policy isn't to ensure that the document is kept, but to ensure that it's destroyed before it could be used in court, etc. This is incorrect. A good document retention policy covers both of those scenarios, as well as several others.
There are several good reasons why a document must be retained for a certain (or indefinate) amount of time - including legal reasons. Many businesses - even entire industries such as banking, telecom, finance, insurance, etc - must keep some records indefinately. In some cases, documents may need to be kept for a certain minimum amount of time - say three years or seven years - before being destroyed. In cases such as these, it's to satisfy certain legal or industry requirements, after which the prime reason for destruction is usually the cost of retention.
And yes, retention does cost money. You have to factor in the cost of paper (acid free, for those docs that aren't stored electronically), storage (environmentally controlled), disaster recovery (in cases the storage site burns down), media (for those docs that are stored electronically) and hardware to read the media.
Like you said, however, there are also valid reasons to ensure that some documents are not retained. In particular, e-mails. My company, for example, has a document retention policy stating that e-mail servers are not backed up. E-mail older than 45 days is automatically deleted. You're not allowed to auto-copy incoming e-mail to an alternate location or mailbox, to ensure that copies are kept elsewhere.
At a past client, e-mail servers were torn down monthly, had replacement hard drives installed, and had the server software reinstalled from scratch - importing in e-mail that is less than 30 days old. The old hard drives were shipped off to a destruction facility (managed by the client). All old servers had all media removed and shipped to the same facility. Any server or PC that was repurposed also had media replaced - again, the old media shipped off for destruction.
The most important thing about any document retention policy, however, is due dilligence. In every scenario - whether ensuring the destruction of past e-mails, the retention of legally sensitive documents, or the security of those documents - a good policy should cover everything.
Re:Document Retention (Score:3, Informative)
What in the hell for, if not to hide illegal practices? Okay, in case a competitor gets a hand on a hard drive -- but why wouldn't the competitor just copy the files?
What a waste of hardware!
Big in Financial World (Score:2)
For example, let's just say that you had a friend working at a competitor company. One day you go out to lunch and plan this over email that you would wait for him in his lobby. Years later, you still have that email. Now your company is being sued for stealing proprietary technology from the other company and the people higher up claim that no employee of that company has ever entered the rival company. This email that you used to make plans could potentially be used against you and your company.
It's a crazy crazy world...
There was always a joke running around the office of how a technophobe manager would print out his emails so that he could shred them.
Re:Big in Financial World (Score:2)
Now there's a fine distinction. "Obstruction of justice? No sir, we prefer to think of it 'avoiding complications'..."
Personal Documents and Scanners (Score:2, Interesting)
-Mike
The Reasons for Having a Document Retention Policy (Score:2, Informative)
Why keep documents:
1. The company May need the data in the future. (who erases old source code?)
2. Legal & regulatory laws & rules. The SEC, IRS, FDA, etc... requires many companies need to keep certain documents (e.g. Tax returns) for a specified amount of time (usually 1n10 years)
Why destroy all old documents:
1. There are many many documents in a large company, all the e-mails, reports, memos, meeting minutes, etc... Not all of these documents are to the long term benefit of the company, even if the creator / reciever believes it to be. Without examining each document, the executives do not know what is benign and what is catastrophic.
2. Retaining documents can be expensive. A compnay of 100 people could fill multiple closets, a company of 10,000 could fill warehouses. Yes, imaging solutions exist but are not cheap. Office space is not free.
3. If a company destroys only selected, possibly damaging information, it appears suspicious. If a company has a policy and consistantly follows it to destroy all old documents (shred, delete, burn backups, etc...) then if old information is not available, it is because of the policy.
Three words for Enron et. al. (Score:2)
Actually anything that provides DoD standard wiping.
Make sure to have the program make at least ten FULL passes. Next step: shred the hard drive.
Linux'rs... don't forget that by default 'shred' may not actually 'delete' the files you are trying to get rid of. So if for example you've got "Enron Accounting Data - John look at this something is going down big at the company.txt" you may want to make sure it's deleted.
Btw, I've used Norton's Wipe Info to remove things such as accounting files if I ever sold the computer or hard drive. In the past version there was a "Send To" option, but now it's gone. Anyone know why that is? Also, after I bought System Works for 2002, I noticed that there is no longer a "Wipe Free Space" option in either Wipe Info or Speed Disk. What gives?
My big question...why? (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean, what if the government adopted this policy. What if instead of keeping old documents until they could be declassified the government went ahead and destroyed them? Would we tolerate it? Then why would we tolerate it from business that are for the most part just like little governments?
Paper copies I understand getting rid of. For some companies just a years worth of records fills a small warehouse. But storage space is just so darn cheap and optical media is perfectly suited for long term archiving.
What if thirty years from now (in a fictional paradise) Microsoft went out of business and then the document stores were "declassified". We would finally be able to see exactly what they knew or didn't know about their monopolistic practices. Shouldn't we want to know the inside story so like good little students of history we could either avoid or repeat it (depending on your point of view)?
Our government has done and continues to do some bad, bad things. I mean the CIA implanted a microphone and 20 pounds of batteries in a friggin cat in the hopes he would perch outside the KGB headquarters...radiation testing on humans, stuff like that. But companies can do things that are just as bad.
I think they should pass a law that requires companies to store copies of all documents in escrow with an independant third-part for as long as they are in business. After that, anyone who wants a copy should be able to get it. Of course, some of the stuff will be "classified". If Company B purchases Company A they don't want Company A's secret recipie for sale. Customer billing information would need to be kept secret. But eventually, after enough time, the information would be abandoned and then it should be returned to the public so they can have a full and complete knowledge of what was going on.
How are we going to understand how Enron got away with it for so long if we let the wolf guard the chicken coop?
- JoeShmoe
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Double-edged sword (Score:5, Insightful)
This may be a good policy when you have something to hide. In the IT world, in my experience (and the experience of most of my peers it seems), old e-mail has helped way more often than it hurts us. If you use e-mail to document conversations, meetings, etc., a lot of disputes get resolved pretty quickly when you pull out an old e-mail and say, "See, here's what you said." or "See, here's what we said we would do."
This doesn't happen if we have to print "important" e-mails. Why? Two reasons. First, you usually don't know a year or two in advance which e-mails are going to be important some day. We may generate a thousand messages plus over the course of a project. Most of them are routine, or are only of passing interest. Every once in a while, however, there will be a design decision (or more likely a design compromise) that one party has conveniently forgotten.
Conversely, if someone can show us that we did, in fact, agree to do something, then we will commit to doing it. Our memories are cloudy too, and we do believe in delivering what we said we would.
The second reason paper filing doesn't work for most of us is that it's extra work. Want to file an e-mail - drag it to a folder. Done. Need to file a paper document - remember to print it, interrupt whatever you're doing to leave your desk, find the right folder (if there's room in the cabinet), file it. If you're on the road, remember to go back later, once you're back in the office, and follow the steps above. This works OK if you're an executive with a secretary dedicated to such tasks. Around here, at least, that perk has become too expensive for all except the most senior management. And, even though paper filing doesn't take much effort for a single document, it is a lot of work for hundreds of e-mails, it requires filing space that is in short supply, and it requires a degree of discipline that most people don't seem to have. Finally, even if you have a good paper filing system, it's much easier to search electronic files quickly.
This is exactly why electronic files are so dangerous in litigation - if you can search them quickly, so can your adversary. By prohibiting them, however, you reduce productivity across the entire company and increase costs. I'm not convinced that the legal eagles balanced the immediate cost benefits against the possible future risk. They only consider the dark side.
On a related note, I know I just read an article (here?) about how electronic documents have a life of their own thanks to widespread forwarding. Your retention policies may be almost meaningless if your correspondants keep everything.
Re:Double-edged sword (Score:3, Interesting)
In other words, given the customer's determination to implement a circuit designed in the early 1960's in surface-mount parts, that was the best part available, and probably still is. It wasn't good enough, but they wouldn't let me re-design to avoid it, and I've got their e-mails to prove it. We cranked out my more reliable design based around a 74HC 74 IC real fast, and they ate the cost.
Without e-mails, I barely remembered this particular case out of several others, and the actual decision makers at both companies were gone...
Why destroy? - Answered (Score:2)
Here's why:
Finally there are required retention and documentation times for many industries as well as "best practices" by many professionial organizations and certifying bodies.
Don't ask here for information on those but rather your own corporate lawyers as well as run a memo through the various departments for their specific requirements.
Allnighterking (Score:2)
Basically however the rules for maintaining paperwork have been around since Bob Cratchett was doing books for scrooge and before.... why oh why does anyone think that making them bits and bytes instead of pen and ink changes anything.
cross-cut (Score:2)
Re:cross-cut (Score:3, Funny)
Hrm...
It's probably better than tech support...
The solution (Score:2)
7 years.....IRS.....Most thigs really.... (Score:2)
Here, in our department (IT at my place of work), we archive everything, but not for reasons you'd think. Almost all reports are archived just in case someone looses their report. You heard it right....LOOSING a report! Sometimes it's even important stuff that get's lost, thrown away or shredded. We had to beg to get a shredder just so we can make sure we shred the jams that have readable data on it. It's important to archive but it's also just as important to make sure that when a report needs shredded, or disposed of, that it's done in a fairly secure manner (burning is best....shreds can be taped if desparate enough....).
Most of you have it all wrong (Score:2, Interesting)
There's a reason why you need to have these policies, even if you're company is doing nothing wrong. Let's say you're company is sued somewhere down the line, and the court or the lawyers issue a subpoena for all information relating to Company B, which you've had a long-standing relationship with. You need to hand over ALL YOUR DATA. Do you know where all the e-mails you ever sent to the company over the past ten years are? Are there old backup tapes in the closet that you can't read because you don't have the equipment? Well, that's too bad, because if you don't hand over ALL THE DATA, it could look like you're hiding something, and get you (and the company) in hot water. Besides, let's say you're the SysAdmin that has to recover ten years' worth of back E-mails and find all the ones that are relevant, knowing your job may be on the line if you mess up. Not fun, huh?
So, you decide to get rid of data that's really old and no longer relevant. But how do you determine that? How would it look if you got rid of all your old data on an arbitrary date, only to get the subpoena the next day? You wouldn't look much better.
What these policies do set up "Any documents of any type that are older than xxx days get destroyed", regardless of their source. This is looked at much more kindly by the authorities, because it is a policy that is set up in advance, with no prior knowledge of any pending actions. And when you only turn over xxx days of documents, your lawyers can say "We've had this policy in effect for the past y years", it doesn't look as suspicious.
My problem is that, as an engineer, I'm supposed to keep documents past the retention limit (perfect example : patent applications and design information that take years to process.) However, our fscking Notes server is set up to delete ALL e-mails after xxx days, no matter what the source! And I found out the hard way that filing E-mails in folders on the server doesn't do squat, because those are cleaned out too! I have to manually lenghten the retention deadline on EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT I need to have saved. (Or, save it off of the Notes servers. Not that I've ever done that...) ;)
Yeah, it's a PITA, but it's the price we pay for living in America, land of the Subpoena and home of the Class-Action Lawsuits!
my experience (Score:2)
0-days (Score:4, Funny)
It's what you're doing anyway, right?
Document retention at Enron I should know I worked (Score:4, Informative)
HT
PWC's new guidelines (Score:4, Informative)
1. Policy. All documents (including those kept in an electronic medium) created or received by the Firm that are necessary or appropriate to record or support the Firm's professional work product or administrative functions shall be retained for a Current Period plus six years (the "Retention Period"), subject only to specifically stated exceptions set forth below. Thereafter, they shall not be retained. Business Unit Leaders and Office Managing Partners are responsible for insuring that their units comply with this Policy.
2. Current Period. Current Period means, in most cases, the calendar year during which the document was created, revised or received. In some cases, Current Period means the effective life of the document. Examples of documents falling into the latter category are office leases, personnel files, contracts to which the Firm is a party, engagement letters relating to continuing client engagements, tax planning files and the "permanent file" of a continuing client.
As a general rule, choice of the appropriate Current Period and corresponding date of record retention termination should be made by the person who created or received the document in question, and not by the Records Center. Questions arising in connection with the choice of an appropriate Current Period should be directed to the appropriate Unit, Line of Business or Office Managing Partner, or the Office of General Counsel.
Note that in some situations, the Retention Period will have to be extended on a year-to-year basis, as when the IRS has not closed a particular tax year of a client within the Retention Period (the tax workpapers should be retained until it has).
3. Examples of Current Period Plus Six Years:
Working papers and correspondence files relating to the Firm's report, dated March 13, 1997, on the financial statements of Universal Widgets as of December 31, 1996: Terminate retention after December 31, 2003.
Lease dated November 1, 1993 covering a lease term of February 1, 1994 through January 31, 1995: Terminate retention after December 31, 2001.
Letter dated August 19, 1996: Terminate retention after December 31, 2002.
Permanent files deemed superseded on September 30, 1998: Terminate retention after December 31, 2004.
Tax, litigation, and bankruptcy planning files created in May 1998 covering the three-year period of 1998, 1999 and 2000: Terminate retention after December 31, 2006.
4. Record Type/Retention Period:
ABAS Files
Billing File - 6 years
Correspondence File - 6 years
Financial Statements - 15 years from record year
Permanent/Carry-Forward - "No date" while active, Current + 6 years from the "superseded date."
Reports - 15 years from the "period ending" specified in report
Superseded - Current + 6 years from the "superseded date"
Workpapers - Current + 6 years
TLS Files
Billing File - 6 years
Correspondence File - 6 years
Permanent/Carry Forward - "No date" while active, Current + 6 years from the "superseded date."
Planning - "No date" while active. Current + 6 years from the "superseded date."
Superseded - Current + 6 years from the "superseded date"
Tax Return - 15 years
TLS IAS - 15 years (Tax Return)
Workpapers - 6 years
The following exceptions to the general policy have their appropriate retention periods set forth in parentheses. For permanent retention, consider microfilming or other less bulky storage systems:
(a) Documents pertaining to Firm governance and regulatory matters (permanent).
(b) Agreements and related documents pertaining to mergers or acquisitions by the Firm, as designated by OGC (permanent).
(c) Minutes of meetings of the Firm's Board of Partners and Principals and the Board's Committees, as well as other Firm Committees designated by the Firm's Senior Partner (permanent).
(d) Certain legal or historical files designated by the General Counsel (discretion of OGC).
(e) Firm Policy Releases (until superseded). The partner or director leading the group issuing the policy should ensure that one full historical set of the Releases or Statements issued by it is retained permanently.
(f) Documents (i) relating to threatened or pending litigation involving the Firm or its personnel or (ii) subject to a subpoena (the longer of the termination of the litigation/subpoena matter or the Retention Period - consultation with OGC required before any disposition).
(g) Financial records, including tax returns, of the Firm (discretion of the Chief Financial Officer).
5. Documents To Be Retained for a Period SHORTER than the Retention Period:
(a) Practice Quality review documents, including reports, correspondence, questionnaires, and supporting workpapers that identify or relate to findings or evaluations of specified engagements, offices or individuals (12 months from date of creation, or less when it is determined by the Director, Audit Quality--or his or her counterparts in other Lines of Business--that they have served their intended purpose).
(b) Personnel records of former employees (Current Period plus three years).
(c) Internal administrative documents, such as office financial information (discretion of appropriate Unit, Line of Business or Office Managing Partner).
(d) Engagements terminated before completion, such as audit engagements where no report is issued (Current Period plus three years; all uncompleted engagements should be clearly marked as such).
6. Other Exceptions:
(a) Any person who creates or receives a document or class of documents that he or she believes should be the subject of an exception should refer the matter to OGC.
(b) OGC will notify the appropriate Records Center of any files that must be retained beyond their assigned destruction date due to pending litigation or other reasons. At that time the files will be retained indefinitely, and destruction will require specific approval of OGC.
(c) In reference to E-mails and general correspondence of any type, if the communication is necessary to support PwC work, it should be included in the engagement files, either electronically or in paper form. If it is not necessary to support PwC work, it should not be retained. Desk file or rough file material should be discarded at the end of the engagement.
7. Organization and Timing of Destruction:
Persons responsible for maintenance of Firm files should conduct a review of all files during each December to identify those files that should be destroyed promptly after December 31 of that year. Thereafter, during January of the following year, such documents should be destroyed only upon formal authorization from the designated partner.
Use Word!!! (Score:3, Funny)
Different Spin (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Keeping old records around can be expensive -- not only do you have to keep the media it's on, but you have to make sure you have the ability to read that media, and once you do, that you have the appropriate software and hardware to understand the message itself. Destroying them after you don't really need them any more saves a lot of expense. And, that doesn't even begin to talk about deteriorating backup media.
2. Similarly, part of the problem is in making sure that you have a *complete* record -- you don't want to have a partial record, where the mail to the CFO says "Hey! Let's screw the employees out of their pension," but not the corresponding mail from the CFO that says "That's illegal and immoral. You're fired." So, the idea is not so much to cover up past wrongs, as it is to make sure that you have a true archive.
3. The other thing is that there are some things that are embarassing, but not illegal -- the fact that the CEO didn't retire for health reasons, but was forced out because he got his secretary pregnant, for example.
I don't know about everybody else, but I use my e-mail as a record of what *I've* done, and 9 months (as somebody mentioned earlier) is not far enough back -- heck, every year we have performance reviews, and how am I going to say "This is what I did 11 months ago" if I don't have any record of what I did 11 months ago.
DR is a hard problem -- many competing concerns (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, my colleagues who have written on the utility of unfiled archives are also correct. Few things are more valuable, and numerous are the times one can "save the day," by a few hours of rummaging to find the "holy grail document."
The problem is that there is no way to have prior knowledge which are the smoking gun documents and which are the holy grail documents. The HG docs can save your life, but the SG docs can kill you. And the likelihood of either situation is rare (although the costs and benefits, respectively, often are astronomical).
Meanwhile, having recent documents around is, simply put, necessary to the efficient operation of a business. That said, e-mails, because of the culture of e-mail use, these days are the single best source of SGDs in modern litigation.
So, a decent (that is responsible) retention policy should balance effectively these competing concerns, even for a truly and genuinely honorable commercial entity. The key idea is this, the retention period should be long enough that the likelihood that the HG-ness of a document will be recognized prior to destruction, and longer than the general utility of having any document handy, but no longer. Guess is somewhere between 18 months and three years, depending on the business.
The retention policy will have exceptions for important instruments, but will require an affirmative effort be made to avoid the axe. Thus, docs identified as HG in nature, after the period, like deeds, source code, contracts with term longer than retention, and special documents are automatically reupped, despite the policy.
Re:Cover WHAT? (Score:4, Interesting)
And if you destroy your key as the feds are coming through the door, that's just like shredding documents -- They'll put you in jail for destroying evidence.
(And yes, well encrypted data is indistinguishable from random data, but it's not going to be too hard for a state's attorney to argue that the huge pile of random data on your HDs is encrypted data, not your
Re:Cover WHAT? (Score:2)
If you have a 90 day document retention policy, that means every day you are deleting the documents that are 91 days old. If you get a an order from the court, does that mean you have to stop your document retention policy?
It seems the line is very fine....
--jeff
Re:Cover WHAT? (Score:3, Insightful)
Encryption wouldn't do much in this case; if the FBI comes in with a warrant, they're going to want them decrypted. What are you going to say to them? "Uhhh, they're unreadable, because they've all been encrypted. And we lost the key."
Of course, encryption makes it easier to obstruct justice, but the people involved generally place more value on their own freedom and career rather than their company's welfare (as they should).
Re:Cover WHAT? (Score:2)
Useless in a legal situation. The court will subpoena key to unlock the files.
Re:Cover WHAT? (Score:2)
Re:Cover WHAT? (Score:2)
If you don't want to loose in court, don't use questionable business practices!
Re:Cover WHAT? (Score:4, Informative)
If you get an email (or hardcopy) message from your boss saying, "screw the client," you'd damn well better keep it. You know what happens if you don't? That's right, with no documentation pointing upstream, you are now the sacrificial goat. Don't think for an instant that a boss willing to screw a client would treat you any differently.
Better still, if the action your boss proposes is illegal, not only should you keep several copies at home and at work, but you may wish to blow the whistle yourself, depending on your paricular moral compass.
The last thing you should do is destroy the message. When the big, bad boomerang-o-karma comes back your way, you'll have no recourse but to take it squarely in the nads.
Re:privacy vs crime (Score:2)
Not all corporations are Enron. Most of them aren't even all that big. Don't paint with such a wide brush.
Are you saying that corporations should disclose everything? Research, development, patents in developent? Everything?
It's like engineering: there will be tradeoffs. For the 100s of decent corporations, there will be a big Enron blight that mucks it up. Should we punish everybody because of one asshole?
Re:privacy vs crime (Score:2)
Then if a time limit must be placed on document life, what about tying it to the statute of limitation on fraud?
Re:privacy vs crime (Score:2)
That's an interesting idea... on the surface it sounds good.
The only problem I can imagine with it right off hand is that it creates an "unfunded mandate". It costs $$$ to store stuff. I dunno what the statute of limitation on fraud is, but let's say 7 years. With a large corporation, that can add up quickly to massive costs. Corps will pass this cost down to consumers, or appeal to legislators for some kind of funding or tax break to fulfill this requirement.
That's not including the personnel overhead to manage and maintain this requirement.
Re:privacy vs crime (Score:3, Informative)
If I were designing a document retention policy for a legitimate company, I would have counsel prepare a schedule of all statutes of limitations that could reasonably apply to each of the company's activities. Documents would be classified according to which activity(ies) they were relevant to, and then set the retention period according to the longest statute of limitations for that activity + 2 years (or whatever statute of limitations governs general tort claims in the jurisdiction) for each classification.
This would cover not only the possibility that we might need the docs to prosecute a lawsuit, but also that we might have to defend a tort claim brought under the "discovery rule." (i.e., the statute of limitations doesn't begin to run until the harm is discovered).
Finally, with regard to electronic documents and e-mail, I would try to ensure that users were trained to delete e-mail of a purely personal nature as soon as they read it (small disk quotas for
With a policy like this in place, the company could rest assured that they would always have all the evidence necessary to protect their rights and to defend themselves should it become necessary to do so.
A company operating on the shady side of the bleeding edge of what is and is not legal, like Enron seems to have been doing, would be another question entirely
Re:privacy vs crime (Score:2)
Re:privacy vs crime (Score:2)
You're being overly exact: I don't equate Enron with a person. I'm using an analogy. Because one kid stabs another in a cyber-cafe, does that mean we should punish all kids by instigating a curfew?
It shouldn't be any different in the case of Enron: the board and executives should be held accountable by their shareholders. Unfortunately, the end that I see has Democrats giving the major players in this scandal a free ride (immunity) in the hopes of sticking it to George Bush and the Republicans. It will become a political game, rather than a legal matter between the top-brass and the truly injured: the employees and shareholders of Enron.
Re:several ways (Score:2)
Sales guys. Seriously, I've noticed that most of the really successful sales guys also tend to be a little, er, overinterested in that sort of thing.
I interned at a internal help desk at a major workstation maker. Mostly just "can't get my email" type stuff, but one time an engineer called and told me he had a "friend" who couldn't stop looking at porn at work. He was afraid of being discovered and getting fired, so he wanted a filter put on his machine to block out porn sites (no filter available; we used the company's UN*X boxes on the desktop, not Windows).
So, for some people it's a problem. For others... well, it's just them.
Shreding the Enron Documents (Score:3, Interesting)
The Enron documents that were shredded are likely the early drafts of the audit report. While it is quite likely that there will be electronic copies of the destroyed documents what the investigators would probably most like to get their hands on would be draft copies with handwritten annotations. It is unlikely in the extreeme that anyone wrote a document that was incriminating on its own, but quite likely that incriminating marginalia existed.
BTW in addition to their involvement in the Sunbeam and Waste Management debacles Anderssen were until recently blacklisted by the UK government who held them responsible for their losses in the Delorean fiasco.