Federal Manager's Daily Report

In a report addressing an issue pertinent to all agencies, the inspector general at the EPA has said the agency needs to improve its retention of text messages sent by its employees since they are official records.

The National Archives and Records Administration considers electronic messages, including text messages, to be federal records when created or received in the course of agency business and agencies must adhere to federal records management laws to manage and preserve them, it noted. The means for example that all text messages potentially responsive to a FOIA or congressional request must be accessible in searches conducted by the agency.

The EPA has put in place policies for preserving text messages and has communicated them to employees and “we did not find instances where the EPA used text messaging to intentionally circumvent the Federal Records Act,” the report said. However, more management attention is needed for records management and FOIA purposes, including preserving messages before they are deleted from a device of before the device is replaced.

Also, the EPA’s mobile device management processes “do not prevent employees from changing the device’s configuration settings for retaining text messages on all government-issued mobile devices,” it said.

The report observed that there is a significant difference in text messaging practices among employees. Among employees with EPA-provided mobile devices, 38 percent sent or received no texts in the first quarter of fiscal 2015, for example, while 45 percent sent or received fewer than 100–but 3 percent sent or received more than 1,000.