EXCLUSIVE: ED IG Complaint: Bypassing Federal Retention Requirements

EDITOR: We received this from the original complainant who died several months ago and am sharing this as a public service.  The distribution of this information is not intended to affirm any judgement regarding the matter. The individual is considered a very reputable source based upon his knowledge and history at the Department of Education (ED).

ED OIG hotline complaint filed :  2 February 2, 2018

“In the last few weeks, …the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the U.S. Department of Education (ED) has purposely and with intent built a separate server for the Secretary of Education…. This separate server bypasses all established ED Information Technology (IT) security protocols by deploying the server outside the EDUCATE DMZ/firewall. It is not clear where the secretary’s private server is located, or who runs and maintains it, but it is rumored to be housed in a commercial off-site [location].  The Secretary’s private email server houses both official U.S. Government information, as well as private information.”

“The private email server was established in order to appease the Secretary who was disgruntled and annoyed with [the CIO’s] at the slow performance of the EDUCATE platform, and demanded an “outside” solution be found immediately.  [The CIO] knowingly and willfully violated numerous ED and other Federal security protocols in establishing this rogue commercial server, choosing to disregard his own security and operational mandates under FISMA, FITARA, NIST, and other Federal statutory  requirements.”

Federal Records Act

1. “The act and its related regulations define Federal records, mandate the creation and preservation of those records necessary to document Federal activities, establish Government ownership of records, and provide the exclusive legal procedures for the disposition of records.”

Richard J. Cox, Closing an Era: Historical Perspectives on Modern Archives and Records Management (Greenwood: 2000), pp. 3-4.

2. Potential Violations: “The head of each Federal agency shall notify the Archivist of any actual, impending, or threatened unlawful removal, defacing, alteration, corruption, deletion, erasure, or other destruction of records in the custody of the agency, and with the assistance of the Archivist shall initiate action through the Attorney General for the recovery of records the head of the Federal agency knows or has reason to believe have been unlawfully removed from that agency, or from another Federal agency whose records have been transferred to the legal custody of that Federal agency.”

https://www.archives.gov

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