The war necessitates issuing new documents and recovering lost ones. At the request of chiefs of staff and secretaries of local councils, the team of the Regional Office of U-LEAD with Europe in the Dnipropetrovsk region held an info session “Handling documents in local self-government bodies: requirements for their creation, systematisation, storage and recovery under martial law”.
“We have prepared advice on how to handle documents given different conditions local self-government bodies can operate in, latest changes to the record-keeping procedures and latest requirements of the State Standards of Ukraine (DSTU). We explained the requirements for recording management activities and issuing and processing documents in the structural units of local councils to municipal professionals and reminded them about the procedures for the systematisation and storage of documents. We also clarified the process of the recovery of documents under martial law,” said Olena Tertyshna, Head of the Regional Office U-LEAD in the Dnipropetrovsk oblast.
The info session elaborated on the recovery of documents lost due to hostilities.
“While the issuance of documents was discussed, our situation calls for talking about their recovery as well. Some municipalities have been damaged by shelling, others are under temporary occupation. As a result, some documents have been destroyed. In certain cases, all of them. How to recover them? What to do? Local self-government bodies must be guided by the Rules for the Organisation of Record Keeping and Archival Storage of Documents in State Bodies, Local Self-Government Bodies, Enterprises, Institutions and Organisations approved by Order of the Ministry of Justice No. 1000/5 dated 18 June 2015,” said Tetiana Korobka, Adviser on Decentralisation and Local Self-Government at U-LEAD in the Sumy oblast.
For the recovery of lost documents, the following procedure should be observed:
- Conduct an inventory (in case of loss of documents and case files listed according to the nomenclature, observe Clause 9 of Chapter 2 of Section V of the Rules of the Ministry of Justice);
- Create a commission tasked with searching for lost documents and their subsequent recovery;
- Compile a list of destroyed case files and documents, identify responsible persons and methods of recovery;
- Draw up a report on the missing case files (documents) in the structural units according to the form given in Appendix 13 to these Rules, which should be signed by the head of the archive (the person responsible for the archive), reviewed by the head of the records department and approved by the head of the institution.
Speakers emphasised that information about the number, name, date and number of sheets of a case file or document should be recorded in the report. The reason for the absence of the case file (document) should be stated to be “destroyed as a result of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation”.
It is also necessary to indicate which documents can be partially or fully reproduced. For instance, some documents can be printed; counterparties, the State Treasury Service, the State Tax Service, the State GeoCadastre, the regional military administration or banking institutions handling the transactions can be contacted. Documents can also be restored based on a court decision. In this case, in accordance with Article 315 of the Civil Code, the case of establishing facts having legal value is initiated.
“Assess the necessity and order of recovering documents and methods of recovery, for example, by making a copy or duplicate. The procedure for making, certifying and issuing copies is determined by the institution’s record-keeping regulation. A copy of a certified copy of the document can be made if the original document is missing or impossible to obtain,” said Victoriia Trotsenko, U-LEAD Adviser on Decentralisation and Local Self-Government in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
To avoid the loss of documents, we recommend several simple but effective solutions:
- Create scanned copies of documents. Scan documents that are subject to long-term storage (more than 10 years) and HR (personnel-related) documents first;
- Save these scans on several media (hard drives, memory cards, etc.);
- Store data in cloud storage (e.g. OneDrive, Google Drive).
Furthermore, observe the Procedure for Ensuring the Evacuation, Storage and Destruction of Documents During the Special Period approved by Order of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine No. 3194/5 dated 17 October 2019. According to this Procedure, a local self-government body can develop its own regulation on evacuation, storage or destruction.