Although people all over the country are trying to start the new year off on the right foot, it would appear that Illinois is destined to ring in 2016 on a bad note. According to an article in the Houston Chronicle, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services won't be getting nearly $40 million from the federal government because of unprocessed paperwork.
While the department has been ordered to use $14 million for a reconstruction of their bureaucratic infrastructure, this is huge news for a state that is very much in financial need.
Lots of directors means lots of confusion
The reason for these paper problems and this turmoil seems to stem from the fact that the director position of the agency has been changing quite a lot in the recent past. The job has seen eight different people in five years, creating a "revolving door" of leaders, according to current acting director George Sheldon.
"Changing jobs creates quite a lot of chaos."
Changing jobs creates quite a lot of chaos, as the employee settles into their new responsibilities and duties. This confusion is only exacerbated by the fact that the director of this agency has to look after the well-being of all the children residing within Illinois. That's quite a hard transition to make, and would certainly explain why so much paperwork was forgotten about.
While this isn't an excuse for so much money being lost, the point here is that human error is very much a part of the modern workplace. No one's perfect, and a hard job such as this can certainly result in some confusion and paper problems.
Paper is hard to track
Although paper allowed mankind to mass produce documents to reach a wide audience, it certainly isn't a perfect mode of communication. Paper is nothing more than a physical object, and objects can very easily be lost.
According to the Paperless Project, an organization committed to bringing about a world without paperwork, about 7.5 percent of business documents somehow get lost and are never recovered. That may not be a high number in and of itself, but considering the number of documents the average company processes, it certainly points to paper being a poor form of communication.
FoIP is a solid solution
While email certainly cuts back on an organization's need to send documents back and forth, it has quite a lot of security vulnerabilities. Companies that deal with sensitive information, or those organizations simply trying to meet compliance standards, can't use email for their communicative needs.
Thankfully, a solution can be found in fax over IP. FoIP allows for a high level of security, while still affording companies the convenience they so desperately crave. What's more, simple fax over IP solutions from FaxCore utilize automatic archiving. This allows organizations to go back and review documents that were either sent or received. Had the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services been using a FoIP solution, this whole debacle very well could have been avoided.
Enhance enterprise communication, collaboration and compliance efforts with a proven FoIP solution from FaxCore. Contact FaxCore today to learn more about their 'Partly-Cloudy' simple fax solutions.
