GAO: NARA not doing its job.

U.S. agencies are not complying with federal laws on electronic record preservation, and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has done little to ensure that agencies properly preserve e-mail, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

According to the July report, the number of agencies NARA has advised on records management has dropped by more than 90 percent in the past five years. In fact, although NARA is responsible for ensuring that other agencies properly store e-mail, it stopped making inspections after President George W. Bush took office in 2001, the report shows.

In the meantime, the government's use of e-mail has increased dramatically, and agencies are struggling to determine which e-mails to delete, which to preserve as public records, and how to store them, according to The Washington Post.

Government investigators looked at four agencies: the Homeland Security Department, the Federal Trade Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. They found that all four used an inefficient, insecure, and archaic process of printing e-marls and storing them in paper form. Only one agency, the EPA, was converting to an electronic system to store e-mail records, the study found.

The GAO also examined electronic records kept by 15 senior officials at the four agencies and found that only seven complied with all federal requirements governing the preservation of electronic records, but eight did not consistently meet them.

Although it has sponsored six studies of agency recordkeeping since 2003, NARA has not conducted any inspections since 2000. The Archives also seriously curtailed its "targeted assistance" efforts to help agencies improve their records processes. In 2002, it completed 76 such projects; last year it completed none, the GAO found.

"Without a consistent oversight program that provides it with a government-wide perspective, NARA has limited assurance that agencies are appropriately managing the records in their custody, increasing the risk that important records will be lost" the GAO said.

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According to The Washington Post, NARA officials told GAO investigators that inspections required too much time and money. Instead, they chose to inspect only under "exceptional circumstances;' when they deem the risk to records as being high and when other methods, such as "targeted assistance;' will not be adequate to mitigate the risk. No recordkeeping challenges have reached that level in the past eight years, NARA officials said.

"In practice, those full-scale inspections were extremely resource-intensive and took several years to complete;' said Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein in a written response to the GAO report. "Once a NARA evaluation report was issued, the need for extensive resources shifted to the agency. Agencies often took years to satisfy recommendations made in NARA evaluations, and records management practices did not necessarily improve."

The GAO report concludes that NARA should resume inspections of agencies' records management practices and recommends that NARA improve its oversight program to include:

* Various types of inspections and surveys, and criteria for ensuring they are regularly performed

* Reporting to Congress and the Office of Management and Budget on the findings and agency responses to its oversight activities, as required by law

The Federal Records Act requires agencies to preserve records that document their organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions. On July 9, the U.S. House passed a bill, H.R. 5811: Electronic Message Preservation Act, which would amend that law and the 1978 Presidential Records Act, as well as require the national archivist to perform regular inspections of recordkeeping systems at every agency and the White House to certify that they are complying with the law.

The bill's future is uncertain, however, because the Bush administration said it would veto the bill because its mandates would "provide the archivist with substantial leeway to establish standards that could impose significant costs and burdens on an incumbent administration, which could interfere with a president's ability to carry out his or her constitutional and statutory responsibilities."