Why Is the "Clean Up Our Act" Campaign Critical?

Firstly, the University's strategic plan outlines a number of strategies that the University will use to achieve its goals, including actively pursuing alternative sources of funding, improving the services it offers to students and taking management steps to reduce its operating costs. Good record keeping is essential to realising these plans. Accountability and transparency to stake holders can only be achieved if it can be shown that funds were expended responsibly and that planned project goals were achieved on time. To do so, the University requires proof in the form of documentary evidence, or records.

Secondly, decentralisation has been adopted as a strategy to reduce costs and improve efficiencies in the general administration of the University. However, it is still necessary to retain centralised control and accountability in the context of decentralised processing. Effective centralised control and accountability is dependent on standardised and reliable record keeping practices to guide staff in faculty and department offices in the creation, organisation, maintenance, retention and retrieval of the growing volume of documents for which they will be responsible. Without centralised control and accountability through proper record keeping, a chaotic situation will arise that will ultimately result in less efficiency and effectiveness and a failure to achieve improved responsiveness to students and other customers.

Thirdly, budget holders in faculty and department offices are aware of their responsibility for retaining documentation. However, as the volume of records grow in proportion to the added duties, it is becoming increasingly difficult to retain and organise such documentation in a way that is easily retrievable. Where record keeping systems break down, the UWI's ability to satisfy audit and other operational, legal and fiscal requirements will be in jeopardy.