58 ANNUAL REPORT 2013 According to the guidelines, social sector cases were to be discarded one year after they were opened. The Ombudsman stated that it was a mistake when the Regional State Administrations discarded social sector cases on the basis of their age by opening year. The Ombudsman based his view on a statement from the State Archives according to which the case age is to be calculated from the year of the closing of the case. In addition, the Ombudsman stated that it is basic­ally insufficient to keep case documents for one year only, because original case documents can only be discarded when there is no longer a legal or administrative need for them. Record systems requirements In section 15 of the Access to Public Administration Files Act, it is stipulated that record systems must be designed to hold information about the date of receipt or dispatch of the documents plus a brief thematic entry about the content of each individual document. Beyond this, there are no further requirements in regard to the layout of record systems or rules about the details of the organisation of the record keeping. However, the Ombudsman has previously stated that a record system must help to ensure that cases are processed, and this within a reasonable space of time. That was not the case when the National Board of Industrial Injuries registered a complaint to the wrong case (the 2012 Annual Report of the Parliamenta­ ry Ombudsman, Case No. 2012-4 – a summary is available in the Englishlanguage version of the Report on www.ombudsmanden.dk). As a result of the mistake, the complaint was not processed in the correct case for almost one year. Instead, the complaint was processed as a request for resumption in another citizen’s case. The organisation of the record system was also a problem in another case, where a university was only able to search for cases by using the applicant’s civil registration number. Among other things, it was not possible to search for cases by a specific subject or a specific provision in the legislation on the State Education Grant and Loan Scheme (the 2006 Annual Report of the Parliamentary Ombudsman, Case No. 2006.390 – a summary in English is available in ‘Summary Annual Report 2006’, Case No. 12-1, on www.ombudsmanden.dk). Since the university was not able to find comparable cases as such, the Ombudsman stated that it might be difficult to adhere to the administrative law principle of equality.