John's statement points to the essential issue that you have to resolve in a case like this. In order to remove the triggers you must either:

1) Do a worst-case analysis and set your  retention to a very conservative value.  Then you must recognize that in most cases the retention period will be much longer than it needs to be (in John's example, decades too long for most records) since the worst-case scenario is undoubtedly an outlier.  this excessive retention is now just a cost of doing business.

2) Attempt to do some sort of average–case analysis, setting your retention to what you believe would be the usual period of need for the records, recognizing  there will be cases where the worst-case scenario will in fact happen and you won't have the records you need.  This also becomes a cost of doing business.

This sort of compromise, necessarily involving the fact that you have to eat some cost or risk or  both, is unavoidable.   Many of these triggering events are embedded in legal requirements or are necessarily a function of the record and what it's used for.

Best regards,

John
John Montaña 
Montaña & Associates
29 Parsons Road
Landenberg Pennsylvania 19350
610-255-1588
484-653-8422 mobile
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www.montana-associates.com
twitter: @johncmontana

			

On Sep 7, 2011, at 8:48 AM, Annunziello, John wrote:

> In my previous organization, we did away with event triggers as they
> were not working as we were seldom notified of the "trigger" to start
> the retention clock.
> 
> As we did this, we assigned retention time periods for what would be the
> longest time for any record in each series.  For instance, if we had to
> keep a record for the life of the employee, we assumed that they would
> start no sooner than the age of 18 and probably would not live beyond
> the age of 90.  This gave a retention value of 72 years.  It did mean
> that we kept some records longer than if we were T+, but it did work. 
> 


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