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Why a Compliance Review is Vital for Local Governments

Email compliance review – IT doesn’t have to be a nightmare Mark Mulcahy – Waterford Technologies Put bluntly, email compliance review is

Email compliance review – IT doesn’t have to be a nightmare

Mark Mulcahy – Waterford Technologies

Put bluntly, email compliance review is important to any organisation. Whether it’s checking that employees are conforming to best practice email etiquette, or ensuring that no one is leaking business secrets, there is always an internal requirement for it. If your organisation also needs to ensure compliance with external regulations such as FOI, GLBS, Basel II or Data Protection Act Requests, a review capability becomes doubly important.

Within local government organisations, the need for a regular compliance review is essential, particularly in terms of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests and the Data Protection Act. It’s also vital in roles dealing directly with service users, or in departments that could attract a high degree of public and press attention.

With many local government workers battling against their limited email quota and resorting to the use of PST files for email and attachment storage, compliance reviews can become a compliance officer’s nightmare, with emails difficult or impossible to access and potential big gaps in email chains. This is where Waterford Technologies can step in with their MailMeter software, which backs up all emails and attachments – even those stored in PST files – and creates a searchable record of all emails and attachments to pass through your servers, reducing the size of your organisation’s collective inbox, as well as the level of stress associated with an email compliance review.

Compliance Review Feature

One of MailMeter’s top features is Compliance Review – the local government compliance officer’s new best friend. It offers a choice of random email selection or reviewer tracking with audit trails, and can monitor email content against lists of words you have selected. Any message that is flagged up by the Compliance Review interface is included in a report send to the reviewer or auditors. They can then tag messages and include comments – activities that can be tracked by the compliance officer.

Examples of words that can be set up to be flagged are:

  • Trade secrets, important deals or projects
  • Financial services terms in accordance with FINRA rules
  • Dangerous words such as gun, kill, bomb, bullet etc.
  • Inappropriate language such as jokes, ethnic slurs, ageist terms, swear words or slang

Your local government organisation, or regulatory body, may require you to review all email, or a specific percentage of it. Because MailMeter’s Compliance Review interface automatically delivers reports based on automatic searches for any group of users over any period of time, the time spent on a compliance review is dramatically reduced. A reviewer can read flagged emails and take appropriate action within minutes.

The compliance officer has full control over the creation and maintenance of plans in MailMeter Compliance Review and can set all criteria including different rules for different user groups, percentages, data ranges, tags and more.

This means much less time is spent trawling emails and the capacity for human error is reduced dramatically. Instead, the compliance team can spend much more time working together to resolve issues – which is better for everyone.

If you’d like to see how Waterford Technologies can help you get the best out of your compliance review team and take the stress out of email monitoring, contact our team today.