The whole point behind applying retention is to establish the value of a record series to the organization (including business value, legal value, fiscal value, and any historic value), and maintaining the records in accordance with that value.  Retentions change all the time - laws change or are enacted, rules and regulations change, the business mission may change, and so forth.  If an organization "puts a stake in the ground as say this is our policy going forward," then no retention would ever have been applied to old stashes and warehouses full of accumulated records prior to a retention policy being put in place.  

The value of the records is the value in this point in time - if a record with a previous retention value still has value (in other words it still gets kept), then it should not have a changed retention.  Not applying the current retention schedule to all records invalidates the purpose of the schedule and can cause, at the least, embarrassment in a legal situation when you produce "old" records kept past a new retention period, but cannot produce "newer" records of the series because the new retention was applied to them.
 
Ginny Jones 
(Virginia A. Jones, CRM, FAI) 
Records Manager 
Information Technology Division 
Newport News Dept. of Public Utilities 
Newport News, VA 
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