It should not be so hard to get document retention right. Governments and companies have long known they must capture and keep important communications not just for posterity but for litigation and regulatory purposes. As conversations moved from pen and paper to fax, phone and email, the legal requirements followed.
Oh, how UK brokers moaned in the early 2010s about the costs and complexities when UK regulators started requiring them to tape mobile phone conversations. But they adjusted.
Now here we go again. Citibank, Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street banks said this month that they expect to pay $200mn apiece for failing to preserve text and WhatsApp conversations on bankers’ personal phones. JPMorgan Chase, which got caught out last winter, has already admitted it did not save tens of thousands of messages. Prosecutors alleged this week that a former Goldman Sachs banker sought to delete texts in which he allegedly discussed insider trading. He denies wrongdoing.
Separately, the US Department of Homeland Security has opened a criminal probe into the disappearance of texts from Donald Trump’s security detail. The Secret Service thought it was a good idea to reset phones as part of an upgrade just three weeks after the January 6 2021 attack on the Capitol.
Regardless of sector, this is absurd. Bankers had been texting and using WhatsApp for years, and some lenders had banned the use of such apps on work phones. Yet no one seems to have thought about the…
