Report: DOE needs better management of records

Suzanne Struglinski

Friday, April 22, 2005 | 9 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department needs to improve its overall management of records, illustrated by problems with Yucca Mountain project documents, according to an inspector general's report issued Thursday.

The report found that across all department offices there is no method for archiving original e-mails or other electronic information and there is a lot of redundancy in the records programs in place. Eliminating duplicative systems could save the department $2 million, according to the report.

Documents are currently a hot topic for the Yucca Mountain project, with ongoing federal investigations into e-mails that suggest U.S. Geological Survey employees falsified scientific information. Nevada officials are also compiling their own arsenal of e-mails they claim prove the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, does not meet criteria required by law.

The report recommends the department create policies for storing e-mails and electronic records. The department Chief Information Officer Rosita Parks agreed with the reports finding and said the department is addressing the issues.

The department is working toward completing its submission to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's License Support Network, a document database designed to make information available to the public. The commission will not docket the project's license application until six months after the department completes the database.

The department said it was complete last year, but Nevada object, saying it was missing millions of e-mails and other documents. An administrative court within the commission agreed with Nevada, so the department plans to try again. The department discovered the USGS e-mails while reviewing documents to put on the network.

The report used the department's failure to emphasize the need for better records management in Thursdays report.

"...employees were required to manually review, classify, and catalogue millions of e-mail messages prior to posting them to the licensing network." the Inspector General found. "At the time of the review, about 6.4 million e-mails remained unprocessed due to the lack of system requirements for archiving e-mail records."

The Inspector General Office performed the review between October 2003 and December 2004.

The Inspector General also pointed to problems with the department's work preparing for the project's document database in May 2004.