Retention of Public Records

The Public Records Law requires that all local and state government agencies follow the following records retention requirements. It is up to the agency to develop its own internal policies and procedures to ensure the requirements of an agency’s schedule for records are met. The Bureau of Records Management consults with personnel from each agency that creates records to determine the ideal retention time for records that meets the organization’s administrative and legal requirements.

Many states as well as a number of cities, towns and villages, have adopted a timetable to keep records. The schedules include the legal as well as the fiscal, historical, and cultural requirements for each type of record maintained by the agency. These schedules are generally grouped into categories or groups, referred to as records series. Each of these records series may have distinct requirements for storage, transfer, or disposal.

The nature and function of a document determines the time frame for a set of records. For instance, a record series that contains information regarding financial transactions, legal actions, or litigation might require a longer retention period than a record series that contains information about employee performance.

A law or regulation may require that a record be kept for a particular period of https://derwentmills.com/2023/06/07/retention-of-public-records/ time. The most common issue is that these regulations and statutes do not define how long the record should be kept in terms of days, months, years or even for a long time.