JPMorgan Chase has now been fined $4 million by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for erasing roughly 47 million emails, among them commercial communication that had been the subject of subpoenas in a minimum of twelve regulatory inquiries.
The emails went out between January 1 and April 23, 2018, and JPMorgan’s broker-dealer affiliate deleted them.
The SEC claims that the elimination took place when JPMorgan’s archives provider investigated a problem with mail that was scheduled to be erased in 2016.
In the end, the vendor violated the SEC’s regulatory retention obligations by erasing emails during the first quarter of 2018.
The SEC claims that its efforts to carry out several securities-related inquiries are being affected by the destroyed records.
8 of the no fewer than 12 civil securities-related governmental inquiries were carried out by the employees of the Commission, and JPMorgan issued subpoenas and requests for papers for conversations that were destroyed and were not recoverable.
The SEC has previously punished JPMorgan for failing to correctly maintain its digital records.
The financial firm had to pay $125 million back in 2021 for losing track of its staff members’ texts and email exchanges.