The Government Accountability Office is urging the National Archives and Records Administration to get tougher with federal agencies over their recordkeeping practices despite questions over the agency's ability to keep up with its workload.

In a report dated Oct. 5--released publically Oct. 27--GAO notes that NARA has resumed formal inspection of federal agencies after suspending them in 2000.

For the past decade, NARA has preferred persuasion and cooperation as its main tools and agencies disliked the inspections, the GAO report says.

However, NARA concluded earlier this year that nearly 80 percent of agencies are at moderate to high risk of improperly destroying records. Federal law requires agencies to "schedule" their records, meaning that they must have a NARA-approved policy in place for reviewing records and selecting for preservation the historically valuable among them. Only days ago, NARA told agencies to assess whether their social media postings require a new schedule.

In a 2009 rule (.pdf) NARA said it would resume inspections but planning for the inspection program is at a high level and still under development, the report states.

"NARA's plans do not explain how it will systematically target and leverage a limited number of inspection to help achieve its goals," chide the auditors.

Although NARA can't singlehandedly solve agency recordkeeping problems, a stepped-up inspection program would "motivate" agencies to do better--and until NARA develops a better inspection methodology, NARA risks losing that leverage, GAO auditors warn.

NARA has had success in having federal agencies submit more records schedules for approval, with the number of submissions nearly doubling in fiscal 2009 to 974 from just 549 the year before. But NARA's capacity to absorb that additional work is limited--the agency closed out only 501 schedules in fiscal 2009, only about 100 more than the previous year when it approved 402 schedules.

As a result, backlog is significant and the median time for schedule approval is 300 days, the report states.

And records, once submitted to NARA, could be in danger of loss even then, simply from the agency's lack of resources and the technological challenges posed by electronic records, GAO auditors warn. In 2009, NARA acknowledged that at least 65 percent of its archival holdings were under imminent threat of information degradation.

For more:
- download the report, GAO-11-15
- see a statement from David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, on the GAO report  
- go to a NARA flow chart for determining whether agency social media records require a new schedule
- download the 2009 final rule announcing the resumption of NARA inspections (.pdf)

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