Responding to criticism of her use of a personal email account for US Government business, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed that recordkeeping requirements would be met because she forwarded mail from her personal email account to US State Department staff where they would be permanently archived. However a new report from the US Office of the Inspector General has blasted Departmental email management practices and concludes that staff only keep a tiny fraction as records.

The review was undertaken between January 24 and March 15, 2014. It found that in 2013, US State Department employees created 41,749 record emails. With more than a billion emails sent, that’s about .006 percent that were retained as records.

State Department officials agreed that many emails that qualify as records are not being saved as record emails.

The report concludes that despite a 2009 upgrade in the Department of State’s system that facilitated the preservation of emails as official records, “Department of State employees have not received adequate training or guidance on their responsibilities for using those systems to preserve “record emails.”

In 2009, the US Bureau of Information Resource Management (IRM) introduced the State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolset (SMART), which allowed for the preservation of emails as official records. SMART allows users to create official records in the form of cables and “record emails” through Microsoft Outlook. Other SMART users can also access SMART cables and record emails using a search function

According to State Department policy, any email that includes information about the organisation, functions, policies, decisions, procedures or operations should be preserved as an "email record," but the report found that employees at the department overwhelmingly lack the guidance and training to properly preserve email records.

According to Department guidelines, “email messages should be saved as records if they document the formulation and execution of basic policies and actions or important meetings; if they facilitate action by agency officials and their successors in office; if they help Department officials answer congressional questions; or if they protect the financial, legal, and other rights of the government or persons the government’s actions directly affect.”

It concludes that “employees do not create record emails because they do not want to make the email available in searches or fear that this availability would inhibit debate about pending decisions.”

“In some cases, it was because the email contained individual opinions that contributed to internal debate on a pending issue. Many interviewees expressed a fear that if participants in such a debate knew that their opinions would be permanently recorded or accessible in searches, they would not express their opinions in an uninhibited manner. In some cases, an email containing a decision that ought to be preserved as a record was preceded by a chain of emails full of deliberative comments. In other instances, the situation discussed in the email was considered sensitive.”

"Record email usage varies widely across bureaus and missions," said the OIG. "The Bureau of Administration needs to exercise central oversight of the use of the record email function."

"In some cases, it was because the email contained individual opinions that contributed to internal debate on a pending issue. Many interviewees expressed a fear that if participants in such a debate knew that their opinions would be permanently recorded or accessible in searches, they would not express their opinions in an uninhibited manner," said the report.

Due to a lack of training, some employees were unaware that this could be avoided by designating record emails "addressee only" or that they could compose emails "for the record" that are not sent to anyone, wrote report authors.

The OIG also concludes that the department's Bureau of Information Resource Management needs to better understand its users in order to make the SMART system more useful.

The full report is available HERE