The recent Report of the Taskforce on Reducing the Regulatory Burdens on Business – Rethinking Regulation mentioned the burden of record-keeping in areas such as the GST, payroll tax, company tax, worker’s compensation, superannuation, Australian Workplace Agreements, privacy, occupational health and safety and food safety.

The Business Council of Australia submitted that "Each piece of new regulation may, when proposed in isolation, look reasonable. The overall effect, however, can be a considerable regulatory burden."

The Task Force concluded:
The key to reducing the record-keeping and reporting burden lies both within and across agencies and will depend on collaboration to rationalise the reporting and data requirements. This approach, however, is foreign to the way government conducts itself, as each agency has autonomous power to determine what will be recorded and reported, different reporting periods and seemingly different outcomes in mind. It is also very likely that departmental funding and accountabilities are based solidly on data collection, reporting and compliance monitoring.

Task Force Recommendation 6.3 was :
The Australian Government should develop and adopt a business reporting standard within the Australian Government sphere by 2008, based on the Netherlands model and work undertaken by the ATO. COAG should consult with state and territory governments to extend this approach to state, territory and local governments as soon as practical thereafter.

Whether this is achievable without radical change is doubtful: for example, the recent WorkChoices legislation and the draft Anti-Money Laundering Bill both contain extensive record retention obligations.

I’ve compiled a table of record retention obligations  (pdf UPDATED July 2009) under various Commonwealth and State Acts. Does anyone want to add to it?

UPDATE: When is a document retention policy really an unlawful document destruction policy?