State Dept. employees aren’t properly recording e-mails, watchdog says

State Department employees don’t have the proper training to preserve agency e-mails, a watchdog found in a report released Wednesday, raising the issue that billions of department e-mails may not have been recorded as they were supposed to be.

Despite a 2009 upgrade to the agency’s records system, the watchdog Inspector General found that employees “have not received adequate training or guidance on their responsibilities for using those systems to preserve ’record emails’ ” designed to document the agency’s actions and decisions.

The report comes a day after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she made a mistake in using a personal e-mail for official business, but that it was an issue of convince for her to just have one account. Mrs. Clinton said that all the e-mails she sent were sent to colleagues on their official government accounts and that her e-mails should be preserved in State Department systems.

But the IG report found that the employees might not being doing the best job of preserving agency e-mails. Out of billions of e-mails, employees only made an effort to preserve 61,156 in 2011, the watchdog said. That number has dropped further, as in 2013 employees created records for only 41,749 e-mails.

“Some employees do not create record emails because they do not want to make the email available in searches or fear that this availability would inhibit debate about pending decisions,” investigators said.

U.S. regulations require federal employees to preserve any documents, be they electronic or paper, that pertain to “the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the Government.”