OTTAWA—The Canada Revenue Agency has destroyed all text message records of its employees and has disabled logging of these messages in the future, the Star has learned.

Emails, released through access to information legislation, reveal that Shared Services Canada, the federal organization responsible for information technology services, destroyed the records in the middle of a business day in August.

“Your request has been actioned,” wrote an official from Shared Services Canada in an email on Aug 27. “BBM and SMS are no longer logged and previous logs have been deleted.”

“Excellent,” replied a deputy assistant commissioner at the CRA the next day. “Thanks so much for your prompt action!”

The Canada Revenue Agency has confirmed to the Star that it instructed the organization to destroy those records and also no longer log the instant messages, including PINs, BBMs and regular texts, going forward.

“Since SMS and BBM messaging are non-secure, transitory methods of communication are used only for routine and nonbusiness related purposes; there is no requirement to maintain the transitory information,” said Philippe Brideau, a CRA spokesman.

The agency declined to say if it verified if any of these records were of business value.

The deletions come as the CRA faces scrutiny over its ongoing audits of charitable organizations as part of a $13-million special fund from the Harper government to investigate whether any are engaging in excessive political activity.

The agency has denied the audits are politically motivated, but some groups say the deletion of logs could erase possible evidence that the government is using the agency to target Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s harshest critics.

“I’m extremely concerned,” said Margrit Eichler, president of Scientists for the Right to Know. “Now we probably will not be able to reconstruct how they arrived at (these decisions) and who was involved.”

On its website, the CRA has reported processing numerous access-to-information requests related to the audits of charities.

The office of Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault, who has previously investigated the deletion of instant messages in other departments, said she will review information about this case “carefully.”

“If the commissioner is satisfied that there are reasonable grounds to investigate this matter, she may initiate an investigation. Investigations under the Act are confidential,” Legault’s spokeswoman Natalie Hall told the Star.

It’s not clear what other federal agencies and departments do, but a manager from Shared Services Canada said in one of the emails obtained by the Star that there was a “wide range” of policies across government with some logging everything and others deleting their logs.

It’s also not clear if any other department has disabled logging of messages, but Brideau of the CRA said that the government would disable BlackBerry logging of instant messages across all departments and agencies once it adopts a new $400-million email system within the next few years.

In the past, Legault has warned that government officials using instant messages were putting access to information in jeopardy since these messages weren’t consistently being stored.

Under Canada’s Access to Information Act, anyone who destroys or conceals government records with the intent of restricting access to information is guilty of an indictable offence and could face up to two years in prison or a $10,000 fine.

There has not been any suggestion that the CRA has broken any rules.

The email records obtained by the Toronto Star show that CRA employee BlackBerry devices were starting to get software updates to disable logging after 10 a.m. on Aug. 27. The updates happened a few hours after the Star published a story saying that the federal government had instructed public servants to delete emails of no business value.

Srinivasan Keshav, a computer science professor at the University of Waterloo, said he was surprised that the government deleted records and disabled logging in the middle of the day, when there’s a risk of disrupting the service.

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Shared Services Canada told the Star in a statement that it operated IT infrastructure, based on instructions from individual departments and agencies that are responsible for their own information management practices.

It said that there was no disruption of the service when it carried out the instructions from the CRA.

The CRA told the Star that while it has disabled the logging of instant messaging, it continues to keep records of other activities of its employees on the Internet, both through their mobile devices and desktop computers, as well as all of their electronic actions on its network.

It said it keeps these logs so that it can respond to any concerns regarding “inappropriate employee conduct in the workplace.”

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