Barclays bank fined by US regulator for record retention failures

Barclays, British fourth largest bank by market value, has been fined 3.75 million US dollars by US financial regulator for systemic failures to preserve electronic records and certain emails and instant messages. The US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced Friday that it fined Barclays Capital Inc. for record-keeping failures between 2002 and 2012. It found that from at least from 2002 to 2012, Barclays failed to preserve many of its required electronic books and records, including order and trade ticket data, trade confirmations, blotters, account records and other similar records, in WORM format. "The issues were widespread and included all of the firm's business areas, thus, Barclays was unable to determine whether all of its electronic books and records were maintained in an unaltered condition," it said. . According to the federal securities laws and FINRA rules, business-related electronic records be kept in non-rewritable, non-erasable format, which are also referred to as "Write-Once, Read-Many" or "WORM" format, to prevent alteration. Brad Bennett, Executive Vice President and Chief of Enforcement of FINRA, said, "Ensuring the integrity, accuracy and accessibility of electronic books and records is essential to a firm's ability to meet its compliance obligations. "The format errors in this case made it nearly impossible for Barclays to verify that these key materials remained in an unaltered condition." FINRA also found that from May 2007 to May 2010, Barclays failed to properly retain certain attachments to Bloomberg emails, and additionally failed to properly retain approximately 3.3 million Bloomberg instant messages from October 2008 to May 2010.