As the State Department scrambles to respond to the flood of requests for official emails to and from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a separate federal department is struggling to manage the consequences of its own failure to keep its business on its servers.
The Department of Energy’s Inspector General released a report Wednesday, describing several “issues” with the department’s handling of electronic records—particularly staff emails.
“Guidelines within which employees could send or receive work-related email from their personal accounts had not been established, making archival and retrieval of potential records difficult or impossible,” the IG reported.
That deficiency, the report warned could “significantly impact the Department’s ability to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests, ongoing litigation, or law enforcement efforts.”
The IG noted that most of the record-keeping problems identified had been previously reported in a 2010 audit, and that “despite recent concerns regarding email records retention, effective records management had not been treated as a priority.”
According to guidelines established by the National Archives and Records administration, federal departments are required to enact policies to ensure that all records—including emails—are properly stored.
Clinton, now a front-runner for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, apologized this week for using a personal email server to conduct official business at the State Department.
“I take responsibility and I am trying to be as transparent as I possibly can,” she told ABC News on Tuesday.
The current Secretary of State, John Kerry, meanwhile, has appointed a “transparency coordinator” at the department to increase responsiveness to the dramatic increase in records request that have followed the Clinton email probe.
In it’s report on Wednesday, the DOE Inspector General recommended better training, coordination, and software applications to address the bad recordkeeping habits at the department.
DOE concurred with the recommendations, and, according to the IG, “indicated that corrective actions had been initiated or were planned to address the identified issues.”
