JPMorgan Chase Fined $4 Million for “Mistakenly” Deleting 47 Million Emails

JPMorgan Chase has been fined $4 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) after it mistakenly deleted 47 million emails. The emails, which were sent and received between January 1 and April 23, 2018, were required to be kept for three years under SEC rules.

The deletions occurred after JPMorgan's corporate compliance technology department sought help from an outside vendor to delete some communications from the 1970s and 1980s. The vendor failed to properly apply the three-year retention setting to "Chase" emails from early 2018, which resulted in the permanent deletion of all of the emails in that domain from that period which were not subject to legal holds.

JPMorgan did not admit or deny wrongdoing in agreeing to the civil settlement. The bank has said that it takes its record-keeping obligations seriously and has adopted its own email coding procedures to avoid a recurrence.

The SEC said that JPMorgan's failure to properly preserve records hampered regulatory investigations into the bank. In at least 12 civil securities-related regulatory probes, the SEC was unable to comply with subpoenas and document requests for communications that had been permanently deleted.

The SEC's enforcement director, Gurbir Grewal, said that the settlement "should serve as a reminder to all companies that they have a responsibility to preserve their records in accordance with the law."