WASHINGTON — The State Department produced ‘‘inaccurate and incomplete’’ responses to public records requests while Hillary Clinton led the department, including its inability to find documents showing she used a private e-mail account for official business, the agency’s watchdog reported Thursday.
The inspector general’s findings came the same day the State Department was expected to release thousands more pages of correspondence from Clinton, now the Democratic presidential hopeful. The report found personnel responsible for Freedom of Information Act requests in the secretary’s office often missed deadlines and did not meet legal requirements for conducting complete searches.
Overall, Inspector General Steve Linick found a ‘‘lack of oversight’’ by agency leadership, as well as a ‘‘failure to routinely search e-mails’’ as part of FOIA requests.
The report faulted ongoing staff shortages amid requests that have taken more than 16 months to process, stretching back to requests during President George W. Bush’s administration.
Clinton, the front-runner for her party’s presidential nomination, has faced criticism for relying on a private, homemade e-mail server to conduct State Department business. The AP first reported in March 2014 the existence of a server in her Chappaqua, N.Y., home. She used that server instead of an official account on government e-mail systems.
While Clinton was in charge, a request for her schedules by the AP ‘‘sat dormant for several years’’ until the news cooperative sued the State Department last March. Four months later, the agency disclosed in court filings that it finally had conducted a search and located at least 4,440 records.
Clinton has since handed over 55,000 pages of e-mails to the State Department that she said pertained to her work as secretary, using her personal address.
But Linick’s report underscored inherent problems for responses to records requests when government employees use a private account.
Federal law ‘‘neither authorizes nor requires agencies to search for federal records in personal e-mail accounts maintained on private servers or through commercial providers’’ such as Gmail or Yahoo, the report stated. ‘‘Furthermore, the FOIA analyst has no way to independently locate federal records from such accounts unless employees take steps to preserve official e-mails in department record-keeping systems.’’
The State Department said it is ‘‘committed to transparency, and the issues addressed in this report have the full attention’’ of Secretary of State John Kerry. It said the volume of FOIA requests had tripled since 2008, and resources have not kept pace. ‘‘We know we must continue to improve our FOIA responsiveness, and are taking additional steps to do so,’’ spokesman John Kirby said.
Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said the State Department ‘‘had a preexisting process in place to handle the tens of thousands of requests it received annually, and that established process was followed by the secretary and her staff throughout her tenure.’’