Media | Article
Document retention has electronic implications
Monday 6 March 2006
Middletons' IT partner, Cameron Abbott, believes many Australian businesses are still struggling with already complex document retention laws as new legislation covering anti-money laundering and counter terrorism financing threatens to make the climate even more demanding."As far as the law is concerned, there is no difference in the requirements of a business to retain electronic documents and hard copy documents, and that places a severe burden on retention systems," Mr Abbott said at a Middletons breakfast seminar.
"All businesses need to be on top of this, especially with the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter Terrorism Financing Bills looking set to be passed by Federal Parliament. With that and the Victorian Crimes (Document Destruction) Bill 2005 - which can impose severe sanctions on those who destroy documents of interest to possible legal proceedings - businesses just cannot ignore this issue any longer.
"It is now even more important that all businesses look at the systems they have in place for document storage, and whether or not they have enough legal protection in place. Deleting an email from the system could be regarded as the same as document shredding. The ubiquitous nature of emails means it is now all too easy for employees to attempt to delete evidence to avoid blame.
"There is now such a matrix of legislation, both here and in overseas jurisdictions, that businesses need to consider the issue from a corporate governance perspective and get clear policies implemented that span physical and electronic documents and correspondence."
Mr Abbott said the storage of electronic documents and messages was more complex than the same for hard copy documents, yet is often an area that is simply left to an IT department to manage without any legal or risk management input. Chris Egan from solutions supplier Synergy explained that businesses are starting with infrastructure projects which then grow to cover document retention policies as stakeholders start to realise how neglected the area has been.
"You need to be on top of the security issues as well as just dealing with the volume of emails that a business receives," Mr Abbott said. "At Middletons we receive between 40 and 50,000 emails a week, with about 2/3rds of that coming from more than 400 legitimate sources – that is a lot of data to keep track of.
"It might be an onerous task, but it is not one any business can ignore."
