5 CFR § 293.303 - The roles and responsibilities of the Office, agencies, and custodians.
(a) The Official Personnel Folder (OPF) of each employee in a position subject to civil service rules and regulations and of each former employee who held such a position is part of the records of the Office of Personnel Management (Office).
(b) The Office has Government-wide responsibility for developing regulations, practices and procedures for the establishment, maintenance, and transfer of OPFs.
(c) Agencies shall be responsible for the following:
(1) The establishment of the OPF for a new appointee or a new employee for whom no OPF has previously been established; and
(2) The maintenance of a previously existing OPF during the period any new appointee or employee remains an agency's employee.
(d)
(1) Custodian means the agency in physical possession of an OPF. In the case of an electronic OPF (eOPF), the custodian is the agency that has primary access to an eOPF contained within a document management system approved by the Office.
(2) A custodian shall be responsible for the maintenance and transfer of the OPF or eOPF, and the costs associated with these activities.
(3) An agency is the custodian of an OPF it requests from the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC), for any temporary use, from the date that the OPF is transmitted by the NPRC to the agency until the date that the NPRC receives the OPF back from the agency.
(4) An agency is no longer the custodian of an OPF once the OPF has been transferred to and accepted by the NPRC.
(5) Once NPRC has approved the transfer, the Office is the custodian of the OPF until the destruction date established for the file pursuant to the National Archive and Records Administration's General Records Schedule, unless another agency requests the OPF from the NPRC in the interim.
(e) Agencies and custodians shall carry out their responsibilities with respect to the OPF or eOPF in accordance with this subpart and the Office's Guide to Personnel Recordkeeping.