Managing Personnel Records - International Records Management ...

Activity 20
A small Commonwealth country was having difficulty establishing coherence
between its payroll system and its computerised personnel information system (CPIS).
The CPIS designers had not considered using its paper-based personnel files as a data
source or audit checkpoint. The paper files were dismissed as being too incomplete to
be reliable, and data survey forms and head counts provided the data source for the
CPIS. As a result, the payroll and the CPIS did not match, and when they were
checked against the paper-based personnel files, there was a large margin of error.
Only in 14 percent of the sample checked was there a complete match of information.
The two key issues, the lack of flow of information between the systems and the lack
of a common number shared between them, were then tackled.
The records manager considered the merits of using the payroll number, the tax
identity number, the social security number and the national identity number as the
unique identifier. She discovered that none of the numbering systems was applicable
to every civil servant, but she decided that the payroll number was the most suitable
as the link between the three systems. The payroll number made it possible to locate
all information on any given individual and facilitates audit checks. To incorporate
the payroll number into the CPIS, she would take the following steps.
1. She would create a data field for the payroll number in the CPIS.
2. She would use the payroll number as the retrieval number for the paper-based
files. This would involve reorganising the files in payroll number order, both
in the civil service department and in the employing ministries and agencies.
This would also involve creating names indexes in each instance. She
recommended using the order established by the CPIS database.
3. She would introduce simple running numbering systems in each employing
ministry or department for non-pensionable staff, who had no payroll
numbers, and then she would develop indexes based on those numbers.
The records manager then went on to analyse information flows between the systems.
She saw that when new staff were appointed to ministries and departments or when
staff were promoted, salary input forms were completed by the employing agency and
passed to the payroll unit of the accountant general. She recommended that in each
case a duplicate of the payroll input form should be passed to the CPIS managers, to
add to the CPIS database.
MANAGING PERSONNEL RECORDS
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