White House archiving of e-mails still dysfunctional

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Feb 26, 2008 | by Pete Yost Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- The White House still has not finished work on a new records management and e-mail archiving system, a project that began nearly five years ago.

The status of the electronic records system is detailed in testimony scheduled for delivery Tuesday to a House committee investigating whether millions of White House e-mails have disappeared.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is looking into information from a White House-prepared chart from several years ago that indicates e-mail was not archived in various White House units for 473 days over a period of 20 months.

A search for the e-mail has been under way for months. A senior administration official said Monday night that officials believe they have message information "for a substantial number of those component days."

"We believe that our current archiving system is adequate. It is substantially automated, but it can be improved," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The official said he was not authorized to speak on the record before the congressional hearing.

In June 2003, the White House was planning to work with outside contractors to build an Electronic Communications Records Management System, or ECRMS.

But that proposed system was canceled in late 2006, according to the prepared testimony of Theresa Payton, chief information officer in the White House Office of Administration.

More money and modifications would have been needed for the system to meet records management and archiving requirements, Payton's testimony said.

"While testing the process of loading e-mail records into the ECRMS system, the team" of White House technical staffers "also found performance issues," Payton's testimony added.

The White House is in the process of deploying a new system for records management, Payton added.

The White House faces lawsuits and a congressional hearing over its e-mail problems. One of the private groups filing the lawsuits alleges that more than 10 million White House e-mails are missing.

Monthly e-mail traffic is 1 million to 1.5 million electronic messages, according to a 2003 White House report.

Promptly putting in place a records management system with a searchable database, computer experts have said, would have enabled the White House to avoid its current problems in which it is still hunting for potentially lost e-mail.