Exxon has an automatic ‘file sweep’ programme that has been deleting company records dated before August 2015. And, apparently, no backup exists for the deleted records. Did Exxon’s automatic ‘file sweep’ programme brush away the pre-contract records? Hence, what evidence will Exxon be submitting to prove its portion of the estimated US$900 million pre-contract costs?
On October 5th, 2019, the New York Office of the Attorney General (OAG) filed courts documents that stated, “After the OAG brought the Tracker Account to this Court’s attention, ExxonMobil revealed that it had failed to preserve any emails from that account before August 18, 2015. This was caused by ExxonMobil’s failure to disable its automatic ‘file sweep’ deletion program for the Tracker Account, even though ExxonMobil turned off the automatic deletion program for every other custodian after receiving the Subpoena.” A copy of the filing can be found here: https://www.oggn.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/exxon_filesweep.pdf
The Tracker Account was the primary email account that was being used by the then CEO, Rex Tillerson, to conduct official company business.
Exxon claimed the CEO’s emails were destroyed by an automatic ‘file sweep’ deletion programme. These deletion programmes are common and are used in companies to purge old files. The reasons for their use vary from saving storage space to limiting the exposure if an employee’s laptop is stolen. In Exxon’s case, it appears that their automatic ‘file sweep’ programme was poorly designed to blindly wipe files older than August, 2015. The programme didn’t have any built-in intelligence to recognise sensitive CEO emails from benign ones.
Try deleting a file on a Windows PC; it will prompt you to confirm that the file should be deleted. That confirmation prompt has been a feature of Microsoft Windows for many years and it is a widely adopted pattern in many types of software programmes. Deleting the CEO’s emails without a confirmation prompt raises question about if the ‘file sweep’ programme was created in haste without proper verification of its features. If so, what other records did it “accidentally” delete?
There is another puzzle. A large international company like Exxon would likely backup its most important data. Large international companies cannot afford to have their computing systems down for even a few hours, especially the systems used by the CEO’s office to make billion-dollar investment decisions. That data would likely be backed up on disks that are stored in a different location and sometimes even in a different country. These disks are usually offline which means a poorly designed automatic programme would not have access to remove this data. The public should question if the CEO’s emails were accidentally deleted (implied by labelling the programme automatic), why one of the largest companies of the world didn’t have a backup disk with the stored emails. If backups are performed at least weekly in the CEO’s office, you would expect many backup disks to exist with copies of the emails that were from August 2015 and before.
It is unlikely the ‘file sweep’ programme is only executed against the CEO’s emails and those of his executives. In my personal experience, having worked at one of the largest and oldest technology firms in the world, these programmes are usually deployed company-wide.
Recall that the pre-contract costs up to December 2015 was US$460 million and those costs have been incurred as far back as 1999. Now, if this Exxon ‘file sweep’ programme was blindly deleting files before August, 2015, then how is Exxon going to prove its share of the US$460 million pre-contract costs?
The pre-contract costs are probably composed of numerous individual items too small and likely deemed immaterial for public company disclosures. Thus, one can speculate the individual items necessary to conduct a reasonable audit are not in any public documents disclosed to organisations like the US Securities Exchange Commission. The source for these records may be the oil companies. Did the Government of Guyana keep any detailed records submitted by the oil companies from 1999 to 2015 that it can provide to the UK firm it hired? If not, what records are being verified and what is the criteria to deem them authentic?
In the coming years, we will have hundreds of billions of US dollars of oil extracted within our territorial waters. Currently, we have to pay an offshore firm to audit pre-contract costs that stretch over more than 15 years. What is the government doing to ensure we don’t have a similar situation in the future?
Yours faithfully,
Darshanand Khusial
