The state Public Regulation Commission will revisit its electronic public records policy, which Administrative Services Division Director Juan Rios said that no one has followed.

The January 2009 policy calls for employees of the regulatory agency to sort their own e-mails and determine what is public. Those public records then must be forwarded to an address for retention.

But nothing is being sent there, Rios said.

The issue came up after The New Mexican requested the e-mails of former Insurance Superintendent Mo Chavez.

"I think we need to revisit this entire policy as a whole," Rios said. "Just in this one case alone, it's evident you can't rely on the employee to retain public records ... It relies on people, but how do you police 300 people?"

The request for Chavez's e-mails since Jan. 1, 2010, only turned up messages sent to his address after he resigned in May. He left the job in the wake of criticism over approval of a hike in health-insurance premiums for some 40,000 individual customers of Blue Cross Blue Shield. No e-mails from his time on the job were in his inbox.

Chavez said he has nothing to hide and cleaned his inbox at the direction of the agency's information technology staff.

And, he said, it was his understanding that the state's Department of Information Technology keeps copies of all state e-mails for review.

"If you use a state e-mail, it's public, so I always assumed there's a copy of it somewhere," he said.

But that's not the case, said Department of Information Technology spokeswoman Deborah Martinez.

She said in an e-mail that each agency is responsible for keeping its own records in accordance with policies of the state Records and Archives Center, although her department keeps backups for 30 days in case of a system failure.

Because Chavez was a division director, his e-mails should have been kept for two years under the state's records retention schedule. That policy outlines how long e-mails should be kept, based on content.

Making employees keep the right records isn't as easy as it sounds, said Sarah Welsh, director of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government.

"It's a big issue that every public employee needs to be aware of. They are creating public documents every day. If they are not cataloging them according to the retention schedule, they are essentially destroying public documents."

The issue doesn't just involve the PRC, Welsh said, but many state agencies.

It's also a topic over which the federal government has been wrangling.

A recent self-assessment by the National Archives found 79 percent of agencies were at moderate or high risk of improper destruction of electronic records, according to testimony last week at a meeting of the Information Policy, Census and National Archives Subcommittee of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Contact Kate Nash at 986-3036 or knash@sfnewmexican.com.