It has happened to all of us, once in a while. We walk into the back room, the office basement, the filing closet down the hallway, and we see it. Stacks, piles, mountains of documents greet us, so many papers that we don’t even remember where they came from. This type of situation is common among even the most well organized office. Often, after a document has been used for its immediate purpose, we leave it in a box or a filing cabinet where it sits until spring cleaning transfers it to this infamous backroom. Our boss might wander down the hall and wonder “why can’t we just get rid of all this mess?”
The answer is that many types of documents have certain legal life spans, periods in which you are obligated to retain them. A purchase order, a student record, the blueprint for your building: all of these documents have a different time period that they need to be saved. The New Jersey state agency that keeps track of these laws is called the Records Management Services (RMS), formerly known as the Division of Archives and Records Management (DARM). In NJ, all public agencies such as schools, hospitals or municipal governments have to get RMS’s approval before they can legally destroy documents. A report that lists the contents of each individual box must be submitted to RMS with signatures from the agency in order to commence the destruction process. But here’s where disposing of old documents gets tricky: each type of document has its own unique code. Each department in a public agency has a unique schedule of retention codes which RMS provides online in PDF format. Sorting through all of these 100s of retention codes can be quite daunting! Fear not, for at FileBank this task is one of my specialties. If you keep a few essential points in mind when getting ready to destroy your documents, you will make working with RMS a simple, efficient experience.
First: Are you putting all of the same type of document in each box? You would be surprised how easy it is to forget to do this! I have seen file boxes where someone literally took their entire inbox from their desk (plastic container included) and put it in a box to be destroyed. RMS will not accept boxes packed in this way, for there is no way to code all the mixed up documents in such a box.
Second: Have you divided your boxes into their proper departments? An employee record and a purchase order are not part of the same department. This example is very obvious, but be careful that each set of boxes represents only one department – for RMS accepts one report per.
Third: Don’t know if something can be destroyed? Look it up! The PDFs that RMS provides online have a search tool (the binoculars icon) that allows you to look up a document’s retention code by keyword. The more you reference these schedules, the easier it will be for you to identify those really tricky documents.
Finally, pay close attention to signatures! In my experience, the destruction of obsolete files is most often retarded by a missing signature on one of the necessary forms. Depending on the type of agency requesting permission to destroy, 2-4 different signatures will be needed before RMS accepts a destruction report. Also, pay close attention to who is signing which fields. For example, Field 4 on the form must be signed by the Custodian of Records and Field 3 must be
Feel free to post any questions you might have about RMS below. Also make sure to check the links side bar to the right of this post, where you can go to RMS’s website and learn more about what they do for NJ! Also, please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions specifically related to FileBank’s services in relation to RMS.
