Poor record keeping in public institutions; Head of PRAAD places blame on institutional heads
The acting Director of the Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD), Mr Felix Nyarko Ampong, has blamed heads of government institutions for poor record management in their establishments.
He said many heads of government institutions did not appreciate the importance of records management until they needed to retrieve records for urgent purposes.
“If you mismanage records in your office, the records will mismanage you,” he said in an interview with the Daily Graphic Friday.
His comments come in the wake of the difficulties being faced by some government institutions in retrieving records for submission to the Judgement Debt Commissioner investigating judgement debt payments and other related matters from 1992 to 2012.
Officials of the Bank of Ghana (BoG), the Controller and Accountant-General’s Department (CAGD) and the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning (MoFEP) all pleaded with the commission at its public sitting this week to give them more time to search and retrieve documents on judgement debt payments.
The Deputy Controller and Accountant-General in charge of Treasury, James Ntim Amponsah, had told the commission last Wednesday that frantic efforts by CAGD officials to retrieve documents lodged at PRAAD had so far proved futile.
Responding to those challenges, the acting Director of PRAAD said the blame must be laid squarely at the doorstep of the CAGD and other government institutions for their records keeping unconsciousness.
According to him, if the CAGD had followed the standard processes of records keeping, any document it was looking for at PRAAD could be retrieved within two minutes.
He said the CAGD had written to PRAAD requesting for the retrieval of documents on judgement debt payments but because it did not cite the specific reference details of those documents, it would be difficult to retrieve them.
Explaining the processes of records keeping at PRAAD, Mr Ampong said there were two types of records — semi-current records which were five-year-old materials kept at the National Records Centre and archival records which were at least 30-year-old materials kept at the archives.
He said after taking delivery of semi-current records, which were exclusive to the creating agencies for reference, PRAAD officers processed them by listing the files, boxing and shelving them with code names.
Mr Ampong said the difficulty involved in the CAGD’s efforts at retrieving records on judgement debt payments was that the documents were scattered in some files packed in boxes but the CAGD officials could not provide the specific reference details to aid their quick retrieval.
He said sometimes the records being requested for might not have been sent to PRAAD for keeping, in the first place, adding, “We have nothing to hide if only the records are here.”
Mr Ampong advised heads of government institutions to take firm responsibility for the management of records they created in their establishments.
He made reference to the Public Records and Archives Administration Act, 1997 (Act 535) which gives PRAAD the mandate for the proper and effective keeping of records in public institutions.
The act provides in Section 9: “The head of every public institution where public records are created and kept shall establish good records keeping practices within the registry for management of public records in accordance with standards directed by the department…”
He said records management was an important tool for every public administration, pointing out that the time when people were asked to do records management because they had nothing doing belonged to history.
“It’s time for public officials to take records management seriously,” he insisted.
Mr Ampong said the management of PRAAD had diagnosed the problems of the national records keeping institution and appealed for support from benevolent organisations to help improve the system.
Story by Kofi Yeboah
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