The public records law obliges all state and local agencies to adhere to a set of record retention requirements. It is the responsibility of each agency to create its own internal policies and procedures to ensure that the requirements of the agency’s record retention schedule are fulfilled. The Bureau of Records Management works with the staff at every agency that creates records to determine the period of retention for records that is the most appropriate for the administrative and legal requirements of the organization.
Many states as well as a number of cities, towns and villages, have adopted a timetable to keep documents. These schedules contain the legal requirements, fiscal and historical for each type document maintained by an agency. They are usually arranged in categories or groups referred to as records series. Each record series may have different requirements for storage, transfer or disposal.
In general, a record series’s retention requirement is determined by the nature of the record as well as its purposes. A record series that contains information about financial transactions, litigation or legal proceedings may require a longer time of time to be kept than a series that contains information about employee performance.
Sometimes, however, a record must be kept for a particular period in accordance with a statute or regulation that requires that the record be kept. A common problem is that these regulations and statutes do not specify how long the record must be retained for – days, months, years, or even forever.