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- Key compliance assessment and enforcement records should be fit-for-purpose and contain sufficient information to support regulatory decisions.
- AgriFutures Australia maintained a comprehensive gifts register, which helped it demonstrate that it is appropriately managing its risks of inappropriate external influence. Similarly, retaining records of credit card transactions and their timely review, as the Grains Research and Development Corporation generally did, helps demonstrate that an entity is appropriately managing its credit card risks.
- Records are a critical part of robust knowledge management practices, such as supporting transparency and accountability for past decisions and informing future decision making.
- The ARC administers the NCGP using a bespoke end-to-end Research Management System. Where cost effective, IT infrastructure for grants assessment and grants management should be fit-for-purpose. Systems that embed and validate high volume and transparent processes, such as those used by the ARC for managing potential conflicts of interest within the research sector, can deliver enhanced efficiency and assurance.
- Sound record management procedures should be in place not just for major projects but for all entity business transactions and decision making.
- Given that personnel can change and machinery of government changes can occur, records are a critical part of informing future decision making and transparency and accountability for past decision making.
- When decisions are taken to depart from departmental policies and proven practices, it is important that the reasons for any departures be recorded, including in advice to decision-makers.
- Sound record keeping, including documented rationales for key decisions, can assist in providing transparency and accountability of decision making. This is of particular importance for re-occurring activities, such as the negotiation of enterprise agreements, to provide consistency in assessments, as well as providing future bargaining teams with a solid basis to undertake bargaining activities.
- Entities should ensure that basic controls over the completeness and accuracy of client records are consistently implemented and that critical client records can be reliably located.
- To ensure that collection and other asset management frameworks are complete, up-to-date and accessible to all appropriate staff, entities should: identify all relevant policies, plans and procedures; assess and fill in any gaps in these framework documents, ensuring that they meet applicable standards; and maintain them using appropriate version control and approval. Regular review is necessary to ensure that they are current and relevant; as is maintaining them in a central and accessible location.
