More and more, communications amongst even senior officials are being conducted orally or by means of internal e-mail. There is evidence that government internal communications are becoming increasingly casual, aided by the growing ease and convenience of electronic mail, voice mail, fax and similar tools. Some key decisions and directions are conveyed orally, with no record of the transaction. Minutes of meetings sometimes become cryptic notes designed to obscure, as much as reveal. In a legislated information access environment, the risk of not creating or keeping a record is weighed against having to produce the record and being held accountable for what it contains.
Some officials fear retaining too many records rather than too few.
We have to preserve and develop corporate memory within government institutions, as often decisions are taken after a stream of e-mails, often without being formally recorded. This is the new process of electronic consultation and discussion. Courtesy of an access to information request, filed by an opposition member of Parliament, Canadians learned of an internal audit report on a grant program administered by our department of Human Resources Development. This absence of record-keeping gives fuel to public cynicism concerning the possible political nature of the grants. Whatever the reason, it certainly circumvented public accountability.