managing public sector records: a study programme - International ...

compared with a register of cheques issued and their value. Standardised forms are in
frequent use in accounting because they can be handled compactly for storage and
batching by accounting period; this facilitates disposal. Yet, paradoxically, registers
of cheques, invoices and payment vouchers are some of the most neglected of all
accounting and financial records.
Functionally, the effectiveness of all of these processes depend entirely on record
keeping to provide essential evidence. Not only are records the proof of achievement,
but they provide the mandate for appropriate corrective measures. The government’s
financial management regime is a continuum of activity engaged at any one moment
in dealing with the present, looking to the future and looking back to the past, with
records generated as by-product. Financial recording systems provide the
authoritative information for managing the national economy and support the
evidence base for fiscal accountability in public administration. Some, like the
Budget Statement and the Final Accounts, are published officially. Others are
documentary sources created and held only in government offices.
Financial Record Keeping in Ghana: 1960’s to the
Present
There is no doubt that increases in the volume and range of public financial business
since the 1960s have led to serious difficulties in the management of financial records
both in the agencies in the central administration of finance and other public agencies.
Colonial Financial Orders did not adequately define the statutory arrangements or
explain the procedures required for managing financial records. They made scattered
references to the retention of certain documents for specified minimum periods, but
there was no clearly defined policy or management scheme to achieve records control.
Partly because of the limited scale of government activity and partly because in
practice, clerical functions relating to the management of records had a higher status
in the colonial era than they do now, the sketchy arrangements which operated well in
those times proved to be completely inadequate for an independent Ghana.
With no systems in place to link registries to the National Archives and to ensure a
link between the management of administrative records and historical records, the
national information management infrastructure collapsed, as did all possibility of
fiscal responsibility and accountability. It was not until the advent of the Records
Management Improvement initiative to restructure government record keeping
systems in the early 1990s that serious attention began to be given to mechanisms for
managing current and seem-current records.