All,

I need some tips and hints to pass on regarding marking or flagging files for destruction.  Here's the background and a refresh of who I am.

I work for a wildlife research facility which is part of the USDA, although we're several bureaucratic layers down.  We're a small slice of government heaven, about 150 employees at headquarters and throughout the US.  A staff person here is responsible for the Worker's Comp program and given our size, he does other duties too as our volume of Workers Comp files are small.  As an aside, we have a small volume of just about every other type of record except research data.   My dealings with Worker's Comp files are to make sure retention is followed, which is 3 years after the case is closed or when deadline for filing a claim has passed. (that's from our records management schedule and Worker's Comp Program.)

Our parent agency wants to standardize how agencies handle their Worker's Comp records and to that end, is developing a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).  When I reviewed the SOP, I was troubled by a statement that "all files will be purged periodically according to a set schedule (to be determined.)"  I said if the retention is 3 years, that's when destruction happens.  The response back was that the every few years files will be purged.  The reasoning is that since claims are initiated constantly and therefore have various start dates, they want to go through every file just once, rather than destroying cases one by one as they come across them if their 3 year period is up.  I countered that what that means is that some files will be past retention by several years and that's not a good thing for all sorts of reasons

Now that I've set the situation up, here's where I need assistance.  How do others flag or mark files so that it's easy to pull at the end of a retention year?  That's the info this person needs, particularly for large amounts of records.  I thought of color coding, moving files to a different drawer or area by year or something like that.  What I need is to know what some of you do with files like this.  What works for you?  I know the case to make to her that what she proposes is problematic but I also want to be able to say "and here's exactly how you can make this happen to follow retention."

Many thanks and feel free to respond offline!
Nancy

Nancy Freeman, CA
Records Manager/Archivist
National Wildlife Research Center
4101 LaPorte Ave.
Fort Collins, CO  80521
Ph:  (970) 266-602
Fax:  (970) 266-6010
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