The office of secretary of defense is likely not undertaking proper records disposition of emails and shared files, says a National Archives and Records Administration inspection report (.pdf) obtained by FierceGovernmentIT. The report, dated December 2010, is not classified nor otherwise restricted from public distribution.

The report examines, in particular, record keeping by the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, but also other wider OSD records management efforts. Because OUSD(I) staff do not consistently properly manage old emails and shared drive files, "NARA therefore considers it likely that proper disposition is not being carried out for emails and shared drives files throughout OSD," the report states.

Emails with a classification rating of up to "secret" from within OUSD(I) and the rest of OSD--with the notable exception of secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense emails--currently get uploaded into a Symantec system called Enterprise Vault. Shared drive files, again up to the "secret" level, not modified for a year automatically also move into a file storage part of eVault. OSD plans to expand eVault to include documents at higher classification levels, the report says.

But, eVault isn't a records management application and the OSD chief information officer treats files within it as "non-records." The system's main purpose is for e-discovery, the report adds.

As a result, unless personnel print out their emails or files onto paper and have them officially dealt with according to policy that permanently or temporarily preserves the notable ones and discards the rest, those documents haven't been properly disposed, despite their archiving on eVault.

Secretary and deputy secretary of defense emails are simply retained indefinitely in the email system, the report says, "and there are no plans to move the emails to an electronic archives."

The report says that Defense Department officials have examined the possibility of adding records management application functionality to eVault, but decided that it would seriously degrade the efficiency of the system.

The DoD CIO records management policy officer told NARA report authors that the department is revising its directive that controls records management, DoD 5015.2 (.pdf), and that the new version will require all OSD components to adopt a records management application within five years of the revised directive's issuance.

Report authors also looked at an attempt by OSD from 2002 to 2004 to eliminate some 5,600 cubic feet of paper records with scanned replacements. Approximately 75 percent of those records, dating from the 1980s to 2004, were identified by DoD workers as a temporary- or non-record despite the collection supposedly having already been screened for permanent records only. Among the documents discovered in the stash--which still exists, physically--were mass market magazines, telephone books and routing slips. The percentage of temporary- and non-records was so high, OSD officials told NARA authors, because the offices that supplied them often designated anything official as a permanent record, didn't want to take the time to categorize records according to a file plan, or thought it safer to simply designate all documents as permanent.

DoD workers scanned anything from the 5,600 cubic feet they thought was of at least temporary value. Although an initial look at the scanned documents indicated that DoD workers made correct decisions on what to keep and what to discard, NARA authors say they "are not sufficiently confident of this conclusion to state with certainty that all the records identified as temporary are, in fact, temporary."

In that light, NARA says OSD should keep on storing all 5,600 cubic feet of the records.

For more:
- download the NARA inspection report (.pdf)
- download DoD Directive 5015.2 (.pdf) and 5015.2 Standard (.pdf); the former is the policy, the latter the DoD testing criteria for records management software

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