Let’s talk about a problem that all of us Records and Information Managers encounter: the challenge of destruction. The ability for us to destroy records is not a foregone conclusion. Destruction is the result of implementing retention, which is an extraordinarily political thing to accomplish
Nearly all respondents (96%) had a pre-approval process for destruction of physical records stored off-site , and the majority (78%) applied a pre-approval process to physical records stored on-site . The most frequent roles involved in pre-approval process for the destruction of physical records were RM, Legal, Tax, and the department that owns the records. 1. Does your company require pre-approval for destruction of physical records stored on-site?
My last blog identified people, process, and technology barriers that can have a chilling effect on deletion / destruction of records...Can you comment on successes you’ve had with deleting / destruction of content? What lessons have you learned?
Process – Applying the physical model for disposition (approvals by audit, legal, and/or tax before destruction) to electronic records doesn’t seem practical but not sure what to do in lieu of it
Do organizations require pre-approval prior to destruction or deletion of records whose retention periods have expired and for which there are no legal or tax holds?
1 Comment - no search term matches found in comments.
To neutralize e-discovery cost and risk issues, organizations must classify documents with a proper filing plan and implement data retention and destruction policies. Regulatory authorities have established clear guidelines (i.e
Otherwise, many records will likely be retained many years longer than necessary and for some non-permanent records, destruction would never occur
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Effective policies clearly state that the organization: Creates accurate, reliable, and trustworthy records needed to operate effectively; Complies with all applicable regulations and requirements; Keeps records for specific time periods; Destroys records no longer needed in the due course of business; and Suspends destruction if investigation or litigation is pending or imminent Retention rules should be as simple as possible. Finite time periods work better than event-based triggers if you want to automatically calculate destruction dates. Retention rules also imply that some categorization has taken place so that groups of related records are treated in the same way
To help clean up the destruction, all of those records have been put into a dumpster with the rubble and debri
The laws and regulations vary, but generally there are provisions that permit the destruction of paper documents if the electronic document is properly “cared for” (lots of lower-level details here, so I’ve intentionally chosen the term “cared for” so as not to be more specific)
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