It is important to make it possible to verify policy decision-making processes by creating and preserving public documents properly. Public servants are urged to enhance their awareness in order to comply with rules and improve administrative efficiency.
The government has decided at a Cabinet meeting on new measures to properly manage official documents. This move has been made in response to a series of scandals, including the alteration of approved documents at the Finance Ministry.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stressed, "It's difficult to regain lost trust, but we must achieve it."
Sloppy handling of public documents affected Diet deliberations and hampered policy implementation. The prime minister needs to exercise his leadership to prevent a recurrence of irregularities.
A main pillar of the measures is to establish a system in which the management of official documents, which has heretofore been left to individual ministries, will be monitored in a unified manner. Under the new system, the post of inspector general for public records management, which is placed in the Cabinet Office, will be upgraded to the director-general level. In addition to specially designated secrets, the inspector general will have a new task of monitoring the management of general administrative documents.
A section in charge will be set up at each ministry with the creation of a post provisionally called chief record officer. Officials with expertise will also be dispatched from the Cabinet Office and the National Archives of Japan. It is significant to take in the viewpoints of outsiders to prevent ministries from simply following precedents.
Public accountability key
New management rules have been applied since April. Under the rules, documents that are kept for less than a year are restricted to ones about business communication and schedules. Administrative documents concerning decision-making processes are required to be preserved for more than a year. This is aimed at preventing documents from being discarded easily.
What should be preserved will be selected from a large volume of documents and stored appropriately. To implement the rules steadily, efforts must be made by the entire government.
Training programs also should be improved to allow officials to acquire practical skills in document management.
The government has stipulated in the measures a policy to impose strict punishments, including dismissal, in malicious cases such as the alteration or systematic disposal of documents.
It has stopped short of revising the Public Records and Archives Management Law to punish such acts as tampering with documents. If the penalties are particularly toughened, there is a risk that officials could shrink back and a trend of not creating public documents in the first place would be encouraged. The government decision is understandable at this point.
Taking advantage of new technologies is also essential. The government will establish a system in which public documents will be managed electronically with consistency, from creation to preservation, disposal or transfer.
Such a system will make it easier to locate documents. It will also be effective to some extent to prevent tampering with documents, as the history of corrections will remain. It will also help reduce wasteful clerical work. It is hoped that the system will be introduced in a planned way.
The government is urged to fulfill its responsibility to explain to the public by making the systems of public document management and information disclosure function as two wheels of the same cart. It is crucial to make this view spread among the bureaucratic organizations.
(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, July 21, 2018)
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