The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission recently levied a $4 million punishment on JPMorgan Chase for deleting roughly 47 million emails, among them commercial correspondence that had been the subject of subpoenas in at least a dozen regulatory inquiries.
The emails were sent between January 1 and April 23, 2018, and the broker-dealer division of JPMorgan has now deleted them.
The purging allegedly occurred while JPMorgan’s archiving provider was investigating a problem with emails that were scheduled to be erased back in 2016.
Emails from the first quarter of 2018 were eventually deleted by the vendor throughout the process, in violation of the SEC’s regulatory retention obligations.
The SEC claims that the removed papers are impeding its ability to carry out a number of investigations against the securities industry.
JPMorgan received subpoenas and document demands for communications that could not be located or delivered because they had been permanently erased in at least twelve civil securities-related regulatory investigations, eight of which were carried out by the Commission personnel.
JPMorgan has already received fines from the SEC for failing to properly retain its own digital records.
For failing to monitor its workers’ email and text message exchanges in 2021, the financial behemoth was fined $125 million.
Furthermore, the company paid the SEC $700,000 in 2005 for the SEC’s failure to get emails needed for regulatory investigations.
JPMorgan claimed to have finished an internal assessment and “established systems and procedures” at that time to make sure it would abide by records demands in the future.