DIMA’s Records Roasting
DIMA’s Records Roasting
If media exposure and a full-scale inquiry are high on your organisation's wishlist, scrutinising your records management practices can wait. Under fire due to two high-profile cases, the National Archives of Australia were asked to assess Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs recordkeeping practices.
After the much publicised wrongful detainment of Cornelia Rau for four months in the Baxter Detention Centre, which led to the Palmer Inquiry, a subsequent investigation revealed a more horrific case: the department had deported Australian citizen, Vivien Alvarez. More recently a "Mr T", who the Commonwealth Ombudsman reports is "an Australian citizen from Vietnam who suffers from severe mental illness", has been wrongfully detained as a suspected unlawful non-citizen. All three individuals shared one important characteristic when they first came into contact with DIMA - the inability to sufficiently identity themselves.
The Palmer inquiry, which revealed DIMA’s actions when it wrongly deported Ms Alvarez, caused community outrage. But Mick Palmer - the man commissioned to head the inquiry - recognised early on the importance of DIMA's failure to manage its information effectively. Palmer reported that Immigration Officers, besides lacking "even basic investigative and management skills", "have an inadequate knowledge of the capability of DIMA information systems". The inquiry has resulted in a $495 million overhaul of DIMA’s information systems, now aptly called ‘Systems for People’. But it was recommendation 5.1 of the Palmer Report which led to the review of DIMA's recordkeeping practices by Australia’s peak recordkeeping body, the National Archives of Australia (NAA).
The Strategic Review of Recordkeeping in DIMA, released in February 2006, stated: recordkeeping in DIMA has not supported its business needs or legislative obligations". While the review clearly states a non-prescriptive nature, it has urged the department to undertake a complete review of its systems and training. Records were managed for the short term and information was needlessly duplicated; the electronic document and records management system was only available to staff in onshore offices, and had been used haphazardly. Senior management did not support recordkeeping and staff failed to accept their responsibility to create and capture records appropriately, often leaving records inadequate, incomplete or unreliable. With no way to control unauthorised destruction of records either, the department's information management procedures, policies and systems were left smouldering, or rather mouldering, quietly.
A consequence of the department's recordkeeping malpractice was that it suffered from a fractured view of its information, which hindered the department's ability to manage cases like that of Rau and Alvarez. Email management was one of the key
problems for staff and, until the Comrie Report, the department's email backup tapes were deleted after 12 months. The problem here was that what constituted a corporate record was at a staff member's discretion; only emails deemed by staff to be corporate records were captured by its EDRMS.
The review also notes a more fundamental problem with the way information was handled. The NAA found it lacked an understanding of the nature and scope of records, leading to the Director, Information Management and Business Record Service not being involved in the management of its data in ICSE, a major technical system of the department which manages client records.
Staff in the department's national and state offices were unaware of their own recordkeeping responsibilities. Failing to comprehend the importance of their records to the organisation as a whole, this view also gave rise to storing information on personal drives and failure to use its (EDRMS). Personal storage areas were treated as the place where draft documents could be worked on while final versions were placed into TRIM. This view fails to see that drafts are also Commonwealth records.
The review reveals that the Records Management area were severely under-utilised in advising staff on their recordkeeping obligations and were not involved in the department's assessment of contractors' performance. That had been left to the contracting department, which lacked the knowledge to conduct qualitative and quantitative performance of these contracts.
Under the glare of NAA, the faults in the department's practices and organisational structure appear stark. Other organisations that escape the spotlight manage to avoid inquiry, and unlike DIMA, have not been forced to reassess the way information is managed.