Legal Question in Business Law in California
Company call logs
Is it illegal for someone within the company to delete a call log entry input manually by another employee?
1 Answer from Attorneys
Re: Company call logs
If there is a law requiring call logs to be maintained, I'm not aware of it.
It could be a violation of company rules or policy, particularly if the person doing the deleting was junior to the person who made the record.
Incidents of this sort can be illegal in certain circumstances, to be sure. The most obvious example is if the deletion were done with the intent to destroy or conceal evidence in an on-going or threatened lawsuit or regulatory-agency investigation.
In many, probably most, crimes, the mere doing of an act is insufficient, by itself, to constitute a crime. One must also have the requisite intent or lack the requisite justification.
For example, destroying evidence is not a crime if you didn't know it was evidence and therefore lacked the specific intent. As another example, intentionally killing people is murder unless you have justification, such as self defense or you are the executioner at the prison, or a combat soldier, etc.