Many State Department employees are not saving their emails for the public record as required by the government, the department's watchdog concluded in a report released Wednesday.
The Inspector General's report found that of the 1 billion emails sent by State Department officials in 2011, when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, only about 61,000 were actually kept for records. It's not clear how many of the 1 billion were supposed to be saved for records but weren't.
According to the report, department employees "have not received adequate training or guidance on their responsibilities for using those systems to preserve 'record emails,'" which could in part explain Clinton's email mishap.
Clinton has been under scrutiny for using a private email account and server for federal business during her tenure as secretary of state, rather than a government-issued one. The report doesn't address the use of non-federal email accounts, which department guidance discouraged.
Despite a 2009 upgrade in the State Department system used to preserve emails, the report found that there still wasn't enough oversight of the function. It found that "many emails that qualify as records are not being saved as record emails" because "some employees were under the impression that record emails were only a convenience; they had not understood that some emails were required to be saved as records."
Other employees didn't "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," the report said.
Federal emails are required to be saved for the public record if they are related to policy, actions by officials or other historically relevant information, according to Fox News.
Clinton claimed that about 30,000 of the emails in her private account were work-related, and turned those over to the State Department for review and record-keeping. But because those emails were sent to and from her privately-owned home server, it's impossible to verify the true number of emails that should have been turned over, in what some are calling a significant breach of transparency.
To fix the problem, the inspector general recommended annual reviews of record email, additional training to identify official records emails, guidance for employees on their record keeping duties, and the creation over an oversight committee to advise on the issue.
