Managing Records for Departing Senior Agency Officials

MEMORANDUM
DATE:	August 23, 2007
SUBJECT:	Managing Records for Departing Senior Agency Officials
FROM:	Molly A. O'Neill /s/ Assistant Administrator and Chief Information Officer Office of Environmental Information
TO:	Chief of Staff Deputy Chief of Staff Assistant Administrators General Counsel Inspector General Chief Financial Officer Associate Administrators Regional Administrators Staff Office Directors Deputy Assistant Administrators Deputy Regional Administrators Assistant Regional Administrators

This memorandum is intended to serve as a reminder to all senior EPA officials of the responsibility to follow federal record-keeping requirements for maintaining and disposing of your Agency records when you leave EPA. You should work closely with your organization's Records Liaison Officer (RLO) to transfer custody of the Agency records you have when you depart. Your RLO will work with EPA's National Records Management Program (NRMP) to ensure that your records are properly retired or disposed of pursuant to EPA's records schedules.

To find the contact information for your organization's RLO please visit:

Headquarters RLOs: http://www.epa.gov/records/people/hq.htm
Regional RLOs: http://www.epa.gov/records/people/region.htm

All federal employees are responsible for creating and preserving records that adequately and properly document "the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency" (44 U.S.C. 3101). However, EPA senior officials (the positions listed above, including other officials when acting in those capacities), must be especially mindful of federal record-keeping responsibilities.

Many of your records are considered "permanent" because they document EPA's decisions and policies. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) determined that records of EPA senior officials have sufficient value to warrant archival preservation. A sample list of the types of permanent records you may have in your office, which you must take special care to preserve, includes the following:

Calendars, schedules and logs of daily activities;
Your records pertaining to committees, including federal advisory boards, committees and councils and inter-Agency and external committees in which you participated;
Program development files that document the development of EPA's policies and programs, including correspondence, briefings, issue papers and reports about policy, strategy, research and legislative priorities, program evaluation and planning, and similar topics;
Reports to Congress and/or the President; and
Speeches and testimony.

Additionally, please note that e-mail messages relevant to the categories above should be saved in the Enterprise Content Management System (ECMS), or they may be printed to paper and transferred to your office's record-keeping system along with your other non-electronic records. For more information on how to identify records and their disposition schedules, records retirement procedures, and other records information, please consult the EPA NRMP Web site at: http://www.epa.gov/records/.

I appreciate your attention to this matter. Should you have questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact John B. Ellis, EPA's Records Officer, at 202-566-1643; ellis.john@epa.gov.

See also:

Managing Records for Departing Senior Agency Officials

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