Document Retention Program Policy

All organizations should establish a companywide document retention policy to ensure that records are maintained for a uniform period and to avoid the undue accumulation of documents that are no longer needed in business operations. Auditing requirements, government regulations, and business and legal needs dictate that certain records need to be kept for specific periods to reconstruct transactions.

In this document, we provide two sample policies that establish definitions, guidelines and procedures an organization should follow during the document retention process.