by KYW's Amy Feldman

The Charleston Gazette reported recently that on his way out as coach of the West Virginia football program, Rich Rodriguez may have destroyed all or most of the paperwork files relating to every player on the roster and all of the activities conducted by the program.   His agent responded, categorically denying the charge and also stating that if some documents were destroyed and weren’t available anywhere else in the University, then “they have serious institutional control issues.”  Um, and personnel issues.

Many companies let individuals keep files in their private file cabinets and don’t have any policy either on where documents should be kept, or for how long they should be retained and when they need automatically to be shredded. If that sounds like your company, you need to create a document retention policy, and base retention periods on legal guidelines appropriate for your industry and the useful life of the document—and then enforce the policy to ensure both that documents are kept—and then destroyed on time. Like making it to your opponent’s 5 yard line but not scoring, if you create a policy but don't enforce it, it won't be worth the paper it's printed on.