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A professor of Archival Studies at the University of Ghana, Professor Harry Akussah, has called on the Judgement Debt Commission (JDC) and the judiciary to sanction heads of public institutions who fail to produce relevant state documents related to their work when they appear before it. His call for the application of a sanction regime follows what he described as �fraudulent behaviour� and �intentional action of obliterating public records� on the part of some public officials. Wilful destruction Prof. Akussah of the Department of Information Studies suspected that some public officials who found incriminating evidence in documents they were asked to produce as part of an enquiry tended to destroy them and gave excuses that the documents could not be found. �There may be chaos in the records system but we must also look at wilful criminal behaviour. Some of them are removed on purpose just to destroy evidence�, he said. Prof. Akussah made the proposal when he appeared before the JDC to brief the commission on the management of public records in the country and the nature of grooming given to persons who worked as records managers in the civil service. Expenditure on information He said about 75 per cent of recurrent public expenditure was on information gathering, contending that it, therefore, did not make sense for someone to wilfully or negligently destroy information after so much had been expended on creating it. �Our refusal to sanction public officials through whose negligence or inaction, the state incurs losses, is part of our bane. We must be prepared to sanction such people�, he held. The law, he said, provided that a person who was guilty of mutilating public records was liable to a fine of GH�500, a prison term for not less than two years or both, and called for that law to be reviewed and replaced with a harsher punishment. Jail them �If one or two persons are jailed, some order would be injected into the system�, Prof. Akussah said. He also bemoaned the situation where public officials used their personal rather than public e-mail addresses in doing government business. When those officials leave, he said, they went away with huge sets of information that were relevant to government business, thereby creating gaps in state information management. �We need to re-orient our officials and hold crash courses at all levels on records management in order to bring them up to speed�, he advised.