Metadata Shows The Baltimore Post May Have Sparked Baltimore County Schools’ Mass Shredding of Financial Disclosure Statements

Details surrounding the destruction of thousands of financial disclosure statements at Baltimore County Public Schools’ Office of Law last year may be sparse, but the timeline of events leading up to the mass shredding may have just become a bit clearer.

According to metadata discovered by The Baltimore Post of electronic files provided by the school system’s law office last year, it appears that a system employee created a document to log the future destruction of the financial records on the same day – and less than one hour after – The Baltimore Post began requesting the documents on February 14, 2018, a full two months prior to the attested date of actual destruction which purportedly occurred on April 27, and again later on August 1, 2018.

What initially began last year as a query into various employees’ ties to vendors, quickly transformed into an investigation involving the nature of the sudden destruction of the very documents requested during a six-month Baltimore Post investigation.

But any attempts to obtain information specifically surrounding the purge of nearly 2,600 financial disclosure records, has left The Baltimore Post with more questions than answers since the office that destroyed the documents says there are no records of any costs, employees, contractors, individuals, equipment, certificates, sign-in logs or even shredding companies involved in the destruction of roughly 40,000 pages containing financial information for hundreds of employees.

But on Thursday, the metadata brought some clarity...

https://thebaltimorepost.com/metadata-shows-the-baltimore-post-may-have-sparked-mass-shredding-of-financial-disclosure-statements/?fbclid=IwAR1CnPCHvHf0kdhbWZQcCZz-zcai-F8pfcr-WEEvEnfFGJ8qYIneHi6bmvQ