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Records Management: Federal Agencies are Over-budget and Swamped with Rapidly Increasing Record Volumes
While the federal government budget has allocated $29.4 million for the purpose of records management, a study by MeriTalk, sponsored by Iron Mountain, found that the actual spending on records management is actually $34.4 million, $5 million over budget. At the current rate, by 2015 federal agencies are expected to be spending $84.1 million on records management.
Financial experts who have looked at federal agency records management programs estimate that about 18 percent of the money spent on records management is wasted or lost. 60 percent of those financial professionals say that problems with managing records is affecting the ability of the agencies to operate.
The MeriTalk study found that, on average, a single federal agency manages 209 million records. And government-wide, agencies are currently managing more than 8.4 billion records. But, the number of records managed by the federal government is rapidly growing. Over the next two years, the number of records, on average, at a single federal agency are expected to more than double to 511 million, and government-wide the number will grow to 20.4 billion.
The report found that while the bulk of new federal records are being created electronically, 41 percent of those documents ultimately are printed and managed in paper format. The types of records managed by agencies include the following:
- 47 percent are electronic
- 39 percent are textual
- 5 percent are audiovisual
- 5 percent are cartographic
- 4 percent are architectural
