The House of Representatives has moved to support the security and record keeping of documents by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC).
Some members of the technical working unit of the House Committee on Legislative Library, Research and Documentation during a visit to the Commission, recently, noted that proper document management was central to effective public service delivery.
The five-man team led by Nandom Rimdan said that the House had instituted the committee, which was the first of its kind, to investigate document management of all government agencies.
He maintained that the team was in the Commission to carry out an on-the-spot assessment of the Commission’s records, submit findings to the Committee, which will in turn help the Assembly come up with laws to enhance document management, thereby eliminating the cumbersome nature of document storage and retrieval in some agencies of government.
He went on to reveal that so far the team had discovered that while some agencies manage their documents properly, some others do not.
Receiving the visitors on behalf of the Commission, the Director of Special Services Department, Mrs. Grace Agha-Ibe, told them that even before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, ICPC had started the digitization of all documents.
Mrs. Agha-Ibe explained that an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) had been deplored for the purpose of digitizing all petitions received by ICPC since inception to date.
In her words, “As soon as this board came on, one of the first things they did was to proactively initiate a digitization of all documents and files in the Commission”.
“So far, all petition files containing about 20,629 petitions have been scanned and uploaded. All personal, confidential and active files have also being scanned and digitised while prosecution and system study files are currently being scanned and uploaded”, she continued.
She however, said that access to files were restricted to only the people working on it per time.
The National Assembly through the committee hopes to enact a law to bring record keeping to the front burner in order to eliminate stress associated to access and retrieval of records which includes physical files, digital files, artifacts etc.