Bulk Record Retention Review

Hi everyone,

I need help, I'm looking for industry best practices or guidance on conducting bulk retention reviews. Back in 2015/2016 my company moved locations, in this move Departments put hardcopy records into boxes and shipped them off to our offsite storage location (we are talking thousands of boxes). They did not include the appropriate retention period and descriptions of the items in the boxes. Here we are years later and I'm working to clean this up.

Is there a industry approach or methodology where we can conduct a recommended sampling of the boxes?

Thanks in advance

What type of company is this, and what regulation are you required to follow?

ChantelJ said:

Hi everyone,

I need help, I'm looking for industry best practices or guidance on conducting bulk retention reviews. Back in 2015/2016 my company moved locations, in this move Departments put hardcopy records into boxes and shipped them off to our offsite storage location (we are talking thousands of boxes). They did not include the appropriate retention period and descriptions of the items in the boxes. Here we are years later and I'm working to clean this up.

Is there a industry approach or methodology where we can conduct a recommended sampling of the boxes?

Thanks in advance

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First off - what is your Record Retention policy and requirements?

2016 is going on 7 years at this point. Depending on the business you are in, there are only a few records you should/would keep longer than 7 years - hence this might be moot.

And if you do require some records to be retained longer than 7 years, the point is moot as well; WHY: you need to go find all those records - you can't just do a sampling and call it done. WHY: what happens if you need a specific record - someone is going to need to find it and the org will look a bit silly if it takes ages to find it. That in and of itself is an issue.

Because of the risk of inadequate sampling, I would avoid using that. Paper records in boxes tend to be jumbled off employees' records/desks/cabinets and other disarrayed environments.

Why are you doing this? Have you considered moving it to electronic media?

What you do makes a huge difference. You may be good to toss it all, or you may need to keep it for decades for legal/regulatory purposes.