The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fined JPMorgan Chase’s broker-dealer arm $4 million for deleting tens of millions of emails from early 2018, with some relating to subpoenas in regulatory investigations.
According to a June 22 adminstrative order, the federal regulator said that J.P. Morgan Securities LLC erased 47 million emails during the period January 1–April 23, 2018. These electronic messages were requested by subpoenas in at least a dozen regulatory probes and “could relate to potential future investigations, legal matters, and regulatory inquiries.”
In 2016, JPMorgan launched a project to eliminate older communications and documents, such as emails, instant messages, and communications shared over Bloomberg, from its system that were no longer required to be retained. After several glitches, the deletions started after the largest U.S. bank’s corporate compliance technology department explored assistance from an external vendor taking care of the financial institution’s email storage. The SEC noted that this vendor did not apply the three-year retention setting to Chase emails,…