Cuomo’s 90-Day Automatic Email Deletion Policy Faces New Scrutiny
The New York State Capitol complex in Albany. Kyle Lee / Shutterstock.com
State workers reportedly face new challenges sorting their inboxes.
The criticism of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s controversial 90-day automatic email deletion policy that was recently implemented for state employees continues to mount.
The state’s chief information officer, Maggie Miller, sent a memo, first reported by Capital New York, to state commissioners and agency heads last month explaining the status of the ongoing migration and consolidation of different state email systems to Microsoft’s cloud-based Office365.
As part of the new system, state employee emails would be automatically deleted after 90 days unless the employee proactively retains important messages.
The policy makes employees responsible for flagging emails that should be retained if they involve pending litigation or are subject to retention under the state’s Freedom of Information Law among other guidelines.
Miller, appointed to her position in December, affirmed her support for the 90-day policy during a tense legislative committee hearing late last month in Albany, where lawmakers grilled her on the what-ifs about the policy, including the biggest what-if: What if somebody files a FOIL request or starts litigation outside of the 90-day window and requires emails that had been already automatically deleted?
Since Miller’s testimony, a top lawmaker has vowed to stop the deletion policy with new legislation. State Sen. Liz Krueger said the state government cannot “adopt a ‘burn and shred’ policy,” according to the New York Post.
Robert Freeman, executive director of the New York Department of State’s Committee on Open Government, told Capital New York this week that the governor’s email deletion policy was problematic because of the unintended destruction of important information communicated via email:
In 2015, in the era of electronic communications—particularly email—often all of us receive email communications that are indeed significant, which likely warrant a retention period of greater than 90 days. Realistically, too, let's face it: mistakes are made. Sometimes if there is an automatic obliteration of records, we may lose materials that are indeed important, that have historical value, and again, there may be situations in which we cannot necessarily predict the significance of the record.
While the Cuomo administration’s 90-day deletion policy, which was adopted in 2013 without much fanfare until it was recently implemented for state employees, has raised plenty of questions about transparency, it’s also been a logistical logjam for state employees to manage.
According to Gotham Gazette:
According to a number of state workers who spoke to Gotham Gazette on the condition of anonymity, regular work habits have been disrupted by the policy that sees emails purged after three months. They say that the policy costs them time because to abide by it they are forced to weigh the State's monumentally large email retention policy against the purge policy, and then ferret out and save important emails.
There is also concern that losing emails will disrupt workflow because employees won't be able to refer back to previous conversations by searching their inboxes, as people often do.
As an investigation by ProPublica, WNYC and the Albany Times-Union of New York state’s email retention policy pointed out last year, there are 215 different categories for records, and various types of records have various time frames for official retention.
"We don't think it's plausible at all that agency personnel are going to meticulously follow" all the email retention regulations, John Kaehny, executive director of ReInvent Albany, told the ProPublica-WNYC-Times-Union investigation.
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