Today, CREW filed a lawsuit against the Department of Education for violating the Federal Records Act (FRA) by failing to preserve copies of emails of official Education business sent by agency employees through the use of non-governmental email accounts.  The documents relating to the lawsuit can be found here. 

As we reported last week,  CREW learned that officials in the Department were using private e-mails to conduct official business:

On May 9, 2007, CREW’s counsel, Dan Roth, had a telephone discussion with FOIA officers who told Mr. Roth that Department personnel “often use private email addresses,” and that the Department “wouldn’t have access to that.” Mr. Roth asked whether private email accounts were used for official business and was told that they were, adding that this issue has arisen in the past in reference to other FOIA requests.

On May 14, 2007, a Department FOIA officer confirmed that Department employees use private email addresses for official business.

This is serious.  If employees are regularly using private email accounts to send official email and the Department neither tracks nor stores such email, the Department may be violating the Federal Records Act (FRA), which requires agencies to preserve records of official business.

This is serious, which is why we filed a lawsuit against the Department of Education today.  When CREW filed this latest lawsuit,  Melanie Sloan said:

Complying with laws -- such as the Federal Records Act -- is not optional. Regretfully, it appears that a lawsuit is required to ensure that the Department of Education follows the law.  The question remains as to whether it is only Department of Education and White House personnel who have been violating record-keeping procedures, or if this is an Administration-wide issue.