The art of compliance

Seems you can’t turn a newspage these days without reading about how companies need to comply with the barrage of government requirements to keep and store e-mail and instant messaging communications.   It’s a burden but as we point out in our Special Focus this week, the incentive to comply is high:

Seems you can’t turn a newspage these days without reading about how companies need to comply with the barrage of government requirements to keep and store e-mail and instant messaging communications. 

It’s a burden but as we point out in our Special Focus this week, the incentive to comply is high:

* Last year, five Wall Street brokerages agreed to pay $8.25 million in fines for discarding e-mail related to customer transactions.

* In July of this year, a court found that UBS Warburg was responsible for paying as much as $300,000 to restore e-mails required for a gender discrimination case.

* A 2003 study by the ePolicy Institute, American Management Association and Clearswift of 1,100 U.S. companies showed that 14% of respondents have been ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee e-mail this year.

* Specific language in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 says “whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies or makes a false entry in any record, document … with intent to impede … shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”

While the compulsion for companies to archive their e-mails is overwhelming, the Radicati Group found that only 37% of organizations have an e-mail archiving policy in place to police such an active business component.

It’s a game of truth or consequences.  For more on this story see: https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/1103specialfocus.html