The Email Compliance Headache
Email is more and more being cited as primary evidence in high profile legal cases. Consider the amount of sexual harassment claims, antitrust claims and discrimination actions that crop up in the news each day. It’s a headache for most employers, who are often held responsible for the actions of employees through email communications. Consider these stats:
- The sending of inappropriate emails by employees embarrassed one top UK law firm, and the world’s media bombarded their head office for weeks afterward.
- In the UK, the Inland Revenue office took action against around 200 employees in relation to misuse of email.
- A total of five Wall Street brokerages had to pay $8.25 million because they discarded email related to customer transactions.
- In the UK, one bank was fined £2.3 million for failing to adhere to compliance regulations.
Email… a sensitive medium with many potential compliance issues
Every day, important business decisions, commitments and financial documents are communicated by email. Companies are being required by law to keep email for substantial retention periods. When compliance isn’t adhered to, there can be substantial legal penalties.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 contains these ominous statements: “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.”
The drive toward email archiving is ever-increasing, but the majority of companies do not have an email management policy.
Email retention issues:
- During retention periods, all organizations have to ensure that their data is available, searchable, secure and very quickly recoverable.
- During legal proceedings, harassment cases, and eDiscovery requests, access is often required to email archives for evidence.
- The integrity of email is vital, so that it can be used as evidence in court cases.
All of the above issues mandate a secure email archiving solution. Download our white paper Email Archiving - Simple steps to Compliance to make sure you are email compliant.