Prosecuting or defending a case is a vital democratic right, but one that's easily undermined by poor recordkeeping. Mother and Baby Home Commission destroys witness testimony Tusla's...
Recordkeeping failures putting children at risk
Failure to meet recordkeeping obligations isn't just a business risk – it can impact human rights, especially for society's most vulnerable cohorts. The following is a collection of documented...
Judge to oversee the financial recovery of ‘failed’ Makana Municipality
The Eastern Cape government of Premier Oscar Mabuyane will have to report to a judge every three months on progress in implementing a financial recovery plan for the Makana Municipality. This is...
Future public inquiries at risk by ‘poor’ information management practices
Future public inquiries such as the recent Alex Salmond affair at Holyrood could be jeopardised by poor information management practices, a government internal review has found. The way that the...
Mining death inquest finds deficient recordkeeping led to suffocation
A coronial inquest into the death of a central Queensland miner who suffocated on lethal gas has found operator Anglo American's record keeping was "grossly deficient" and his death could have been...
Brewarrina Mission connects past and present to Indigenous culture and heritage
The organisers of an inaugural open day at one of Australia's largest former Aboriginal missions hope the event will become a national movement towards Indigenous reconciliation. ... The separation...
Data Protection Commission seeks answers on destruction of mother and baby homes recordings
The Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) has written to the Mother and Baby Homes Commission over the destruction of recordings of witness testimony. A total of 550 people provided personal accounts...
NSW Premier’s Office broke state recordkeeping laws in ‘reckless’ destruction of documents
The NSW premier’s office broke state record-keeping laws by shredding documents related to a pork-barrelling scheme, a watchdog has found. ... An adviser to the premier in October told a...
Freedom of Information coverup clerk stung for £2k after deleting council audio recording
ICO notches up first successful FoI prosecution A town clerk in the English county of Shropshire has been the subject of the first ever successful Freedom of Information prosecution after lying to a...
Homeowners near Wellington complain council lost their paperwork
Homeowners near Wellington are reporting their local council losing the paperwork for their houses. Sue Mortimer can't sell her sunny home on a bush-clad hillside with a glimpse of Plimmerton Beach...
Former chief of staff gets four months in jail for wiping hard drives
David Livingston was convicted of unauthorised use of a computer system for arranging a password that enabled a private contractor to clear hard drives in the Premier’s office before Kathleen Wynne...
Disclosure: TSA cannot verify employees’ criminal histories
Government oversight officials informed Congress on Wednesday that the Transportation Security Administration continues to operate in disarray, failing to record basic security details for thousands...
PG&E can’t find original records for South Bay gas lines
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. says it has lost 12 years of gas-line repair records for part of the Bay Area — the largest such gap to emerge since the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion was blamed on...
Records risk for NZ public sector
New Zealand government agencies have been given a rap on the knuckles for poor record-keeping practices in the 2014-205 annual report from Archives New Zealand, which found that that important...
Sheriff’s Office gets training, writing policies, hiring to improve public records retention
raining of roughly 200 supervisors at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office in the handling of public records as well as other steps to improve a broken and possibly illegal system of not keeping emails...
PG&E management allegedly ordered papers destroyed after blast (US)
A former Pacific Gas and Electric Co. official hired after the San Bruno gas-pipeline explosion to clean up the company’s records said management ordered her to destroy documents and that she found...
Trade Union Royal Commission: CFMEU attempted to cover up document destruction, inquiry hears (AUS)
The head of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) in Queensland ordered the covering up of the destruction of tonnes of documents demanded by the royal commission into trade...
Investigators: Phila. VA needs change, accountability
After a nine-month probe, the VA's Office of Inspector General made 35 recommendations to address shoddy record-keeping, bungled claims, inadequate security, and poor working conditions at the...
What’s driving chaotic dismantling of Canada’s science libraries?
Scientists say the closure of some of the world's finest fishery, ocean and environmental libraries by the Harper government has been so chaotic that irreplaceable collections of intellectual...
Met police still failing on child protection policies, report finds
The police are failing to record more than 800,000 offences, including a quarter of all sexual crimes, reported to them by the public each year, according to a damning official inquiry. Her...
Thousands lose pensions in firms’ ‘Fawlty Towers’ bungles (UK)
Firms have lost "whole box loads of paperwork" recording pension contributions and entitlements, meaning thousands could be deprived of their retirement income. Hundreds of thousands of people may...
More than 10,500 water meters purchased by the city are “unaccounted for
Atlanta’s auditor released a damning investigation of the Department of Watershed Management on Tuesday, reporting that security problems are so bad that it’s impossible to know how much equipment...
More scandals with lost emails are ahead if Congress doesn’t enforce the record-keeping laws on the books (US)
Melanie Sloan and Anne Weismann -- executive director and chief counsel, respectively, of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington -- made two important points in yesterday's edition of...
Government records in a mess in Botswana
The Directorate of Public service management (DPSM) has long been besieged by reports and complaints of maladministration and general malpractice in the running of the civil service. Recent Public...
Quincy city clerk responds to records scandal with training sessions, ‘shred days’ (USA)
Following two recent scandals involving public records, the Quincy city clerk says Quincy’s department heads will be required to undergo records-management training. In March, the city’s public...
Missing high school records stop former students from succeeding (USA)
When Ortiz went to pick up a copy of his high school transcript, he couldn’t believe what he was told. “There was no record of transcripts,” explained Ortiz. “No records of anything. No records of...
Unravelled: A history of the Ontario gas-plant scandal (CAN)
A chronology of events relating to the Ontario Gas Plan 'Scandal'. A criminal investigation into the destruction of emails is underway. Read more: Ottawa Citizen, March 27, 2014
McGuinty’s former chief of staff faces criminal allegations in gas plant probe
Dalton McGuinty’s former chief of staff is accused of orchestrating a plan to purge government records after Ontario’s controversial cancellation of two gas-fired power plants, according to police...
Employees at Scotland Yard ordered to carry out ‘mass shredding’ (UK)
Two employees at Scotland Yard were ordered to shred a “lorry-load” of police corruption intelligence, according to evidence submitted to a damning review of the Metropolitan Police.Top-secret...
Carmel home explosion blamed on faulty pipeline records (USA)
Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s faulty pipeline records, which the utility promised to fix after the deadly San Bruno disaster more than three years ago, are being blamed in a natural-gas explosion...
Shambolic recordkeeping by the NHS wastes money and endangers patients (UK)
A personal journey...
CFTC fines introducing broker $50,000 for failed recordkeeping
New World Holdings destroyed business records and failed to diligently supervise employees CFTC fine: Chicago based introducing broker New World Holdings (NWH) has been imposed a fine by the US...
Barclays fined £2.3m over recordkeeping (UK)
Regulator says bank has failed to preserve order data, trade confirmations, account records and other information. Barclays plc has been fined £2.28m by a US regulator over its alleged decade-long...
Court fines Boehringer $1m for ‘gross inadequacy’ of recordkeeping
The shift to digital documents has solved some record keeping difficulties, but also created a whole new set of opportunities for accidental or malicious errors. Boehringer ...
Military hospitals destroyed thousands of medical records, says veteran (US)
Nanaimo resident Kenneth Young says he was shocked to learn that not only were his medical records from a now-closed military hospital destroyed four years ago, but so were 27,381 boxes of veterans'...
Capps introduces bill to help war veterans without records
Last Wednesday, Capps — who represents more than 50,000 veterans in her 24th District — introduced a bill called the Veterans’ Record Reconstruction Act that would streamline the process by which...
Where are the missing war records? (US)
The top Republican and Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs are demanding more information from defense Secretary Chuck Hagel about lost Army field records from the wars in...
Missing records from predecessor mean $300k in federal reimbursement on hold (US)
Alleged missing or disorganized records at the Athens County Engineer's Office have led to a sheriff's investigation into possible destruction of records and questions about how much the department...
Abusers may be at large, says church (AUS)
Some child sex abusers might still be among Uniting Church clergy because of poor record keeping and failure to investigate cases, the church conceded on Monday. The Victorian inquiry...
FINRA fines five ING firms $1.2 million for email retention and review violations
WASHINGTON — The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced today that it has fined five affiliates of ING $1.2 million for failing to retain or review millions of emails for periods...
Records of civil service pension payments ‘unacceptable’ admit officials
Inadequate records of civil service pension payments are "unacceptable", the government has said after a spending watchdog raised concerns. The National Audit Office qualified the accounts of the...
How Did Scores of Military Units Lose Combat Records in the War on Terror?
Extracts from questions answered by Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter Peter Sleeth on the revelation that field reports have been lost or are missing for many Army units deployed in Iraq and...
The Pentagon has trouble tracking billions of dollars WRT initiatives to counter IEDs (US)
The Pentagon has pumped billions of dollars into programs to counter the dangers of improvised explosive devices over the last decade but still lacks a way to track whether its initiatives are...
Probe into 25 deaths after trust admits ‘poor records’ (UK)
The deaths of 25 patients are under review by one of the UK's biggest NHS trusts, after it admitted "poor record keeping". Westminster and two other London local authorities have expressed "extreme...
The consultants report on recordkeeping within PG&E (US)
The testimony of Paul Duller and Alison North wrt to the San Bruno Gas disaster is now available on the California Public Utilities Commission website. Read the full report. Records Management...
Ex-PG&E manager says key records possibly trashed (US)
A former Pacific Gas and Electric Co. record-keeping manager told federal investigators that a top PG&E official recently acknowledged to him that the utility had likely tossed some of its...
Schools lose records; English learners pay (US)
Poor recordkeeping keeps California schools from getting all of the funding that they have coming, a failing that especially hurts English learners, according to research from the University of...
PG&E agrees to $3m fine over safety records (US)
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. agreed Thursday to pay an unusual gas-safety-related fine of $3 million for what state regulators called "willful non-compliance" with orders to provide key documents...
PG&E search for records after San Bruno disaster
PG&E launches massive record search after San Bruno disaster Confirming worries about the disorganized state of its pipeline records, PG&E on Tuesday said it has launched a massive effort to...
Council records on culvert were inadequate (AUS)
SENIOR officers of Gosford City Council agreed yesterday that the council's record system had failed to keep messages, emails, quotes and estimates that might have allowed proper consideration of...