Keep records longer, Pennsylvania auditor general says … “A Sign of our times”

Posted on Dec 4, 2009 in Records Management News

Keep records longer, Penn­syl­va­nia audi­tor gen­eral says

By Brad Bum­sted
STATE CAPITOL REPORTER
Wednes­day, Decem­ber 2, 2009

HARRISBURG — Forty per­cent of state com­puter doc­u­ments Audi­tor Gen­eral Jack Wag­ner requested for an audit were destroyed before the exam­i­na­tion of $592 mil­lion worth of con­tracts began, a top offi­cial told a Sen­ate panel Tuesday.

Anne Rung, a deputy sec­re­tary of the Depart­ment of Gen­eral Ser­vices, said the doc­u­ments were destroyed “right­fully and law­fully” because some records con­cern­ing con­tracts with Deloitte Con­sult­ing were older than three years and the state’s records reten­tion pol­icy doesn’t require keep­ing records longer.

The agency noti­fied audi­tors about the lack of records in July, said Ed Myslewicz, press sec­re­tary for Gen­eral Services.

“We were never told up front, at the begin­ning of the process” in mid-2008, said Wagner’s spokesman Steve Halvonik.

The Sen­ate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Tech­nol­ogy Com­mit­tee held a hear­ing about Wagner’s audit, issued in Octo­ber, which found lax over­sight of Deloitte Con­sult­ing com­puter con­tracts. Gen­eral Ser­vices, which over­sees state con­tracts, “fell down on the job,” Wag­ner said when he released the audit.

The audit found that $382 mil­lion worth of con­tracts with Deloitte shot up to $592 mil­lion from 2004 to 2007, as a result of change orders, emer­gency con­tracts and no-bid contracts.

The audit did not accuse Deloitte of any­thing improper. Gen­eral Ser­vices offi­cials sharply dis­puted the findings.

Wag­ner said he obtained 25 of 59 state con­tracts with Deloitte, and 33 con­tracts were purged or unavail­able. He told the com­mit­tee records should be retained for seven years.

State records typ­i­cally are main­tained three years, but los­ing bid­ders’ pro­pos­als are purged after six months. Gen­eral Ser­vices Sec­re­tary James Cree­don told the com­mit­tee the agency plans to extend its reten­tion of all records to four years. But he cited space as an issue, say­ing “one can’t keep everything.”

Repub­li­can Sen. Bob Men­sch of Mont­gomery County, who worked in the com­puter and tele­phone indus­try, said later that stor­age space should not be an issue in an era of advanced com­puter tech­nol­ogy. “There’s no space con­sid­er­a­tions once it is in giga­bytes,” he said.

Gen­eral Ser­vices makes avail­able most records on the agency’s Web site, Cree­don said.

Cree­don said the agency imple­mented two-thirds of Wagner’s rec­om­men­da­tions when it began reform­ing pro­ce­dures in 2003. Gen­eral Ser­vices denied 21 of 46 no-bid con­tract pro­pos­als and rejected 357 sole-source pro­cure­ments since 2004, he said.

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research

Cary

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Cary F. McGov­ern, CRM

File­Man