duty to preserve records

Electronic archiving affects all areas of a company. Whether scanning incoming mail, sending electronic orders or invoices, or capturing and storing the endless number of e-mails and data from e-commerce systems, much is archived and some is subject to legal retention requirements.

The many provisions for the retention obligation find their origin in German tax legislation, in the principles for data access and the auditability of digital data, in the Profit Accrual Recording Ordinance and in the German Banking Act. In addition, there are further national, EU-wide and US laws. According to these many regulations, original digital data must be stored electronically, even if it is not machine-readable. Furthermore, companies have the obligation to archive e-mails electronically and, in addition, redundant data from different systems must also be retained.

Tax law expressly grants the tax authorities the right to access electronic systems and their archives as part of tax audits.