When you see the headline on the Drudge Report “Concerns Arise at ACLU Over Document Shredding,” your first reaction: Scandal, lawsuit, cover-up. But there was no scandal, lawsuit, or cover-up. In a week that brought us the Supreme Court’s decision in the Arthur Andersen case and the revelation that Deep Throat was former FBI Deputy Director, Mark Felt, the New York Time’s Stephanie Strom artfully offers evidence why record retention policies are difficult for organizations to design and implement.
Strom’s article, Concerns at A.C.L.U. Over Document Shredding (June 5, 2005), reveals an internal dispute at...
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the ACLU over record retention, which resulted in the resignation of Janet Linde, the ACLU’s chief archivist. The ACLU has had a longstanding record retention policy according to the Times. As a watch-dog organization, this sort of policy is particularly important because the ACLU should be held to the same standards that it demands of everybody else, particularly government officials. Consequently, any diminution in the ACLU's policy should be of concern to the public, as well as those running the ACLU. That is evidently why Ms. Linde took the action that she did.
For our purposes, the controversy serves to illustrate the problems facing all non-profts when it comes to record-retention policies. The ACLU's policy enumerated documents that could be destroyed without creating a record and those that had to be forwarded to the archivist.
The controversy was sparked when the ACLU moved from centralized document shredding to placing shredders throughout its offices several years ago. Employees still had to sign logs identifying what documents were being shredded, but the Times article suggests that the logging procedure was not followed consistently. The placement of shredders throughout the offices was controversial, and there was a partial reversal of that policy. Yet, several key officials retained their shredders.
Some of the shredding appears to have been motivated by concern over Social Security numbers, salary information, and other personnel information falling into the wrong hands, permitting identify theft. This demonstrates that there are a variety of factors at play in any records retention policy. Sure the organization must retain vital records that are required to be kept by law, but the organization also has an interest in preventing identity theft. And the organization should and must be concerned about cover-ups of clear wrongdoing, be it employment discriminaion or national security. Out of those concerns comes what could mistakenly be viewed as a trivial dispute over whether there should be one centralized shredder or a shredder in every office. Yet this seemingly mundane office-management issue demonstrates how the simple placement of equipment carries clear signals to the staff. Does the organization place decision authority in every employee's hands or does it want to send a message that the organization is so serious about its document retention policies that it wants to centralize decisionmaking authority?
To a certain extent, that entire debate is a non sequitur. An evildoer doesn’t need a document shredder to destroy documents--we seem to recall a certain head of the FBI tossing documents into the Potomac River. Moreover, a physical shredder doesn’t address e-mail or computer files, which one recent study said accounted for over 80% of the documents in corporate America. Nevertheless, centralization does send a message and creates an ethic in the workplace--"we take record retention very seriously so if you get caught throwing records into the Potomac don't expect us to stand behind you."
All of this underscores our post earlier this week regarding record
retention policies and small non-profits. As we said then and now
repeat: Record retention raises a difficult set of issues that every
organization must address and sometimes reconcile. This is true
whether the organization is a gigantic university or a small social
services agency. One size does not fit all.
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