United States Government Accountability Office

GAO Testimony

Before the Subcommittee on Information 

Policy, Census, and National Archives, 

House Committee on Oversight and 

Government Reform

FEDERAL RECORDS For Release on Delivery 

Expected at 2 p.m. EDT 

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Agencies Face Challenges 

in Managing E-Mail 

Statement of Linda Koontz, Director 

Information Management Issues 

GAO-08-699T 
GAO’s Preliminary Findings

United States Government Accountability Office

Why GAO Did This Study

Highlights

Accountability Integrity Reliability

April 23, 2008

FEDERAL RECORDS

Agencies Face Challenges in Managing E-Mail 

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

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 email records. 

In view of the importance that email 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. 

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 GAO-08-699T. 

For more information, contact Linda Koontz at

(202) 512-6240 or koontzl@gao.gov. 
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,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.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 email 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 

 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. 

Page 1 GAO-08-699T
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),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 

 3

 According to agency officials, the head of DHS did not have an e-mail account or use email for agency business; accordingly, we reviewed the practices of 15 senior officials. 

Page 2 GAO-08-699T
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 

Page 3 GAO-08-699T
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 email. 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. 

Page 4 GAO-08-699T
NARA and Federal Agencies Have Responsibilities for Federal Records Management 

Under the Federal Records Act,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.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 

 4

 44 U.S.C. chapters 21, 29, 31, and 33. 

5

 44 U.S.C. 3101. 

Page 5 GAO-08-699T
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;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.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,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 

 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 NARAapproved agency records schedule). Agencies may elect to manage such records on the email 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. 

Page 6 GAO-08-699T
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 email 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 

Page 7 GAO-08-699T
classification functions.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.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 email 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. 

 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. 

Page 8 GAO-08-699T
These challenges have been recognized by NARA and the records 

management community in numerous studies and articles.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.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.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. 

 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

www.sciencedirect.com. 

12 SRA International, Inc., Report on Current Recordkeeping Practices within the Federal 

Government, a report sponsored by NARA (Dec. 10, 2001), www.archives.gov/recordsmgmt/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), www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/initiatives/umd-survey.html. 

Page 9 GAO-08-699T
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.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 email records sent or received from nongovernmental e-mail systems 

(such as commercial Web-based systems). Both EPA and FTC 

 14 NARA, A Survey of Federal Agency Records Management Applications 2007 (Jan. 22, 

2008), www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/resources/rma-study-07.pdf. 

Page 10 GAO-08-699T
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.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 email 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 email 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 

 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. 

Page 11 GAO-08-699T
requirements appear.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 

 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.” 

Page 12 GAO-08-699T
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 

Page 13 GAO-08-699T
● 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 longterm 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 

Page 14 GAO-08-699T
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 koontzl@gao.gov. Other individuals who made key 

contributions to this testimony were Timothy Case, Barbara Collier, 

Jennifer Stavros-Turner, and James Sweetman. 

(311102) Page 15 GAO-08-699T
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