The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission just hit JPMorgan Chase with a $4 million fine for deleting about 47 million emails – including business documents sought by subpoenas in at least a dozen regulatory investigations.
The emails, which were erased by JPMorgan’s broker-dealer subsidiary, were sent between January 1st, 2018 and April 23, 2018.
According to the SEC, the purge happened when JPMorgan’s archiving vendor was troubleshooting an issue with emails that were supposed to be deleted back in 2016.
In the process, the vendor ended up deleting emails from the first quarter of 2018, violating the SEC’s regulatory retention requirements.
The SEC says the deleted documents are hindering the agency’s efforts to conduct a series of securities-related investigations.
“In at least twelve civil securities-related regulatory investigations, eight of which were conducted by the Commission staff, JPMorgan received subpoenas and document requests for communications which could not be retrieved or produced because they had been deleted permanently.”
This isn’t the first time JPMorgan has been fined by the SEC for neglecting to properly preserve its own digital records.
Back in 2021, the banking giant paid $125 million for failing to keep track of its employees email and text message communications.
And in 2005, the firm handed $700,000 over to the SEC for failing to retain emails sought in regulatory investigations.
At that time, JPMorgan said it had completed an internal review and “established systems and procedures” to ensure it would comply with records requests in the future.
Don't Miss a Beat – Subscribe to get email alerts delivered directly to your inboxGenerated Image: Midjourney