I read an interesting article in a magazine entitled "BASELINE" (August 2006 edition). The article focussed on the penalties that various companies and large corporations were facing for failing to supply their internal e-mail records during civil court discoveries and proceedings. A quote from the article: "...Facing lawsuits and regulatory audits, companies must produce specific electronic data on time and under pressure. Those that can't (or won't), risk multi-million dollar fines and penalties. "...Yet two thirds of companies live on the edge with no policies for saving, purging, and managing e-mails..."

"...Philip Morris USA was ordered to pay $2.75 million... because managers didn't save printouts of their e-mail messages, as per company policy...".

"...Banc of America Securities, repeatedly failed promptly to furnish e-mails...during a stock trading investigation...which resulted in a $10 million dollar fine..."

When I worked for the RCMP, this became a real issue during criminal disclosure of investigations. Although we were discouraged from communicating operational direction and/or intelligence with our internal GroupWise e-mail system, it still occurred.

Fortunately, the RCMP maintained a sophisticated policy for archiving e-mail, but the task of receiving what was relevant is daunting. What policy does your agency have in regards to internal e-mail integrity? Simply suggesting that police and intelligence personnel should refrain from the use of their e-mail for operational purposes - won't suffice. The question that will always be asked during a judicial process is "Could there have been relevant evidence within the e-mail system of communication that was deleted?" The criticism will mostly focus on what could have been there, but the Court will never know because the agency "maliciously" erased the data....

We recommend you avoid this opportunity for criticism and embarrassment. Even worse, you may face penalty, if not finincial, by reputation, or through negative judicial outcome.