A report by the Auditor General of the City of Buenos Aires (AGCBA, for its acronym in Spanish) found that when the legal area of the Buenos Aires Ministry of Education adopted a new way to record proceedings, reports, memos or claims, forgot to migrate the older data systems and complicated the track of any document which, according to the date of the proceeding, may include two or more systems or subsystems.

The unit concerned is the Directorate General of Legal and Institutional Coordination portfolio (DGCLeI, for its acronym in Spanish). The watchdog tries to track one of the files sampled and found that if they consulted the Single System Table Entries (SUME) in use at the time of the report, "they would had arrived at an erroneous conclusion that (that performance) was located in the Ministry of Education since July 7, 2006. In reality, continues the audit, it has been 23 months since it was passed to a National Prosecuting."

In addition to SUME, operating since October 15, 2007, the day before they had run another program: the Monitoring of Actions (SISEG). Passing the SISEG to SUME, Education did not adapt their records and therefore the same procedure can give different results. To all this, the AGCBA adds that until May 2007, the Ministry worked with its own mechanism: System Desk of the Ministry of Education (SMEMEGC). Thus, the audit noted that "the lack of clarity in the data worsens, no administrative monitoring of activities is provided, or access to information of the parties or third parties is guaranteed."

The report also adopted in April of this year on findings from 2007 says that "the information entered into the system does not reproduce the movement or the actual physical location of the actions within the Ministry at a specific date" internal movements can have identical date and time, and therefore "the system does not provide reliable or useful conclusions" to the actual management of the portfolio.

In this case the Audit exemplifies its remark: it tried to keep track of Note 555 186-DGCLeI-05, which entered Education on October 9, 2007 at 11.25 in the morning and 15 minutes later, at 11.40, had already been turned to another area, "after the intervention of the Directorate of Legal and Institutional Coordination." During the trip, the note "made four intermediate movements", three of which were at the same time.

Moreover, 97% of the sample taken by the AGCBA, around 36 providences, it was found that the proceedings are recorded as having left the Ministry with the same report number. "That is, the system developed -the Sumerian has a data duplication feature, which just shows the unreliability of the information," says the report. In regard to the SISEG, there are 5630 differences between printed and digital lists where movements of the proceedings entered in 2007.

In other listings, the numbering is not correlative: the Audit counted 2380 absences in the register of orders and 6495 in the report. "This is because control- says the agency, to the field for the entry of numbers is not completed or texts as 'a cartulary' or places 'to add / incorporate.'"

Thus the AGCBA concluded that there is "significant delays" in the time of intervention of the Directorate of Legal and Institutional Coordination, and completed: in 11% of the sample, it takes 79 days from the entry to reach legal affairs and, once there, in 25% of the sample it takes another 120 days for the corresponding ruling of the report to be issued.