a place for everything and everything in its place When the Tamil case went missing As seen above, authorities’ lack of order is not just a bad habit but also a problem which can make it difficult to comply with regulations and good administrative practice. We could mention many more examples, and in addition to that, there are with great certainty many more which never come to the Ombudsman’s attention. But how about the Ombudsman institution itself? Are we always on top of things here? Of course, it is no good just saying yes to this question because it happens regularly that calls go out among the Ombudsman staff for older paper cases, which – usually – reappear. A prominent example of such a case is the Tamil case, where the Ombudsman concluded his investigation in 1989. However, when the impeachment trial had finished in 1995, all of the most significant documents in the Ombudsman case were missing. The papers were sought for high and low within the institution until they reappeared suddenly, several years later. In 2012, the Ombudsman institution implemented a fully digitalised case and document management sys­tem so this kind of mistake is not likely to happen again. Nevertheless, as shown in several of the cases mentioned above, it is not enough to have an elec­tronic case and document management system. Keeping the system in order also requires a high standard of data discipline from the employees. Systems are no better than what we put into them! The Ombudsman’s summary paper on public sector IT solutions The Ombudsman has in recent years processed a number of cases in which IT has played a central role and where, regrettably, it had to be concluded that IT solutions had not measured up to the requirements of administrative law. On the Ombudsman’s website, there is a summary paper which gives an overview of the problems within this area which the Ombudsman’s practice has revealed. The central message is that the requirements of administrative law apply no matter how an administrative authority solves a task in purely administrative-technical terms. Thus, the usual rules which the authority is to abide by still apply when computers replace paper. Another important point is that it is the designated authority’s responsibility that its solutions live up to the requirements of administrative law – and the authority has this responsibility even if it has chosen a standard solution which turns out to be insufficient. This applies also if suppliers of IT solutions do not at all offer a solution which meets the demands. The summary paper can be found on http:// en.ombudsmanden.dk/publikationer/. 59