a place for everything and everything in its place sion – on which a decision had already been made. All in all, the case history pointed towards a lack of distinct boundaries between the work of the Ministry of Education’s employees in the secretariat and the other work in the Ministry, and also suggested that it was not clear where the case documents belonged. Based on this, the Ombudsman had to give up investigating the case. When documents are not kept In an unusual case, the Prime Minister’s Office failed to register an essential document. Two journalists requested access to the script which the then Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, brought with him on his first day after the formation of the Government in 2001, according to a portrait book (the 2005 Annual Report of the Parliamentary Ombudsman, Case No. 2005.474 – a summary in English is available in ‘Summary Annual Report 2005’, Case No. 15-2, on www.ombudsmanden.dk). The Prime Minister’s Office confirmed that the Prime Minister had handed in a large pile of papers to the permanent secretary but the material had never ‘been registered as received’ by the Ministry. The Ministry denied the access request on the grounds that the documents were nowhere to be found in the Ministry. The Ombudsman conferred with the Danish State Archives, which were of the opinion that the Ministry ought to have kept the documents in question. On this basis, the Ombudsman stated that the Ministry was obligated to keep the documents. He added that if, according to the archives legislation, a document may not be discarded, the authority must to the extent possible reconstruct the document when it is discovered to be missing. In 2001, it would presumably have been good administrative practice to have registered the Prime Minister’s script, and today, the obligation to register the script would follow directly from the provision in section 15 of the Access to Public Administration Files Act. The fact that there are now actual statutory rules about the obligation to keep records will probably make the authorities pay more attention to the material that has to be registered and thereby kept in the cases. This is also illustrated in another case (the 2008 Annual Report of the Parliamentary Ombudsman, Case No. 2008.399 – a summary in English is available in ‘Summary Annual Report 2008’, Case No. 18-3, on www.ombudsmanden. dk), which the Ombudsman took up on his own initiative: In connection with the structural reform, where the country’s 14 State Counties were merged into five Regional State Administrations, new guidelines for discarding were made. 57