This practice causes enormous waste of tax dollars, frustration and annoyance. With the proliferation of fast copying devices, there is a tendency to produce more copies of documents than are actually needed. File space is consumed with these extra papers, and of greatest importance, the labor involved in the filing process is duplicated many times. Extra copies of the same document are filed in several offices.
Copies multiply rapidly.
In many governmental units, retention periods far exceed known needs of many records. The cost of storing records for excessive retention periods represents direct waste of taxpayer dollars. Personnel in most offices have not systematically inventoried records in the office in the past five years, if ever. Records are not stored and maintained for operations or planning, but simply because there is a remote possibility that they may be needed at some future date.