Deloitte Discovery’s Administrative Records Services

Deloitte Discovery's capabilities

Administrative records give citizens and government officials access to the full range of information required to understand the agency’s decision-making process. The administrative record is an evidentiary trail that documents the basis for the agency’s proposed action.

Deloitte has over a decade of extensive technical and project management experience working with federal agencies to prepare organized and defensible Administrative Records Services (ARs). Over time, we have developed processes and documented leading practices concerning the compilation of administrative records. Our goal is to efficiently produce a clean, accurate administrative record that represents and supports the agency’s decision-making process.

We offer comprehensive, flexible solutions that can be tailored to the individual needs of your agency. Specifically, we:

• Have the knowledge and experience to locate the sources and types of data needed for your administrative record
• Understand how to identify relevant information within the data set
• Prepare the information in a manner that protects agency privileges and sensitive data
• Organize voluminous records to produce a complete, orderly, and defensible administrative record

Identifying sources and collecting data

We have considerable experience in identifying sources and collecting the requisite data needed to produce an AR. We help you identify the proper custodians and collect your data to prepare, process, and produce your AR.

For instance, in support of a recent effort, Deloitte collected 60,000 documents from 200 custodians located in 20 different sites, coordinated the processing of the data, and shepherded the AR through the entire process. We were able to substantially reduce the expansive document set producing only 6,000 documents for a certified AR in six months.

Unfortunately, extraneous circumstances often dictate a more complicated collection effort. For instance, custodians are frequently under tremendous time pressure or might no longer be employed by the agency. When this happens, our clients need us to filter through all of the custodian’s data to find what is relevant to the specific AR at hand, and Deloitte is well-equipped to do so.

For example, one federal custodian was under such scheduling pressures that, in order to capture relevant documents for the AR, Deloitte had to collect more than 10,000 e-mails. We extracted and analyzed relevant metadata from these e-mails and transformed the data into a digestible format to present to the client. We then worked together to identify potentially relevant documents and cull out the remaining extraneous e-mails.