Our well-known JP Morgan was fined $4 million by the US securities watchdog, the SEC, for deleting millions of email files dating back to 2018. The deleted emails related to JP Morgan's subsidiary, Chase Bank.
The financial services giant deleted about 47 million records of electronic communications from about 8.700 electronic mailboxes covering the period from January 1 to April 23, 2018.
Many of these, it turns out, were business records required to be preserved under the ActchangeSecurities Act of 1934, the SEC said in a filing [PDF] detailing her findings.
“In at least 12 regulatory investigations related to equity securities, eight of which were conducted by Commission staff, JPMorgan received calls and requests for documents that could not be retrieved or produced because they had been permanently deleted,” the SEC says.
According to JP Morgan employees have been performing deletion operations on electronic communications since the first quarter of 2018. This according to the company was done in the belief that all documents are stored in such a way that no records can be permanently deleted.
So JP Morgan blames an unnamed archiving vendor it hired to handle storage for its communications.
That is, so that your mind does not go to the wicked...
