Council lost paperwork!

[SeattlePioneer 144]

Hello Abel Magwitch,

 

 

I'm glad to be able to say that lost paperwork hasn't been a problem with my council. Now ME losing paperwork others have given me ---- that can be an issue!

 

I describe my struggles with that weakness on the current thread talking about completing applications.

[AJR2305GDC 10]

Thanks Eagle92

[Daped01 61]

I realize this thread is nearly 2 years old, but i had this experience happen to me just this week. however, at the district level, not council. Our DE was going through our Charter and she said that 3 of our leaders did not have Adult applications on file, and that if we did not have them National was going to fold our pack. Well the gal that runs our pack (not sure of her exact title) told them that they were turned in and they better find them (i may have paraphrased a smidge :-) ) Our DE now turns to me as she apparently sees me as a go getter and asks if I can wrangle down the leaders and get the paperwork for them. I don't have a problem with this as the new ACM, and future CM, i figure it gives me some experience in dealing with district, and it gets me face to face more with the DL's Once the paperwork was turned into me, I faxed it to the District Service Center and asked that an email confirmation be sent to me saying they received it. not only did they send an email, they attached a scanned copy of the paperwork with notations that it had been received. I plan on keeping these copies as well just for future reference. from the stories i have read on here, i may need them.

 

[qwazse 4342]

I realize this thread is nearly 2 years old, but i had this experience happen to me just this week. however, at the district level, not council. Our DE was going through our Charter and she said that 3 of our leaders did not have Adult applications on file, and that if we did not have them National was going to fold our pack. Well the gal that runs our pack (not sure of her exact title) told them that they were turned in and they better find them (i may have paraphrased a smidge :-) ) Our DE now turns to me as she apparently sees me as a go getter and asks if I can wrangle down the leaders and get the paperwork for them. I don't have a problem with this as the new ACM, and future CM, i figure it gives me some experience in dealing with district, and it gets me face to face more with the DL's Once the paperwork was turned into me, I faxed it to the District Service Center and asked that an email confirmation be sent to me saying they received it. not only did they send an email, they attached a scanned copy of the paperwork with notations that it had been received. I plan on keeping these copies as well just for future reference. from the stories i have read on here, i may need them.

The chartered organization should be keeping the copies of adult applications. Sometimes they need a little coaching to do that. Hopefully your story will convince a few to do so.

[dhendron 26]

In our Council (San Diego-Imperial) the assumption is that the submitted paperwork will be lost. It has become a sad institutional joke. We keep copies of everything submitted. At one point, 100% of everything except new applications were lost, including advancement forms, reimbursement requests, leader recognitions, etc. I submitted many items at least two times. Some we got, some we didn't. I always wonder how all that paperwork gets lost, until one year I found out that a Council employee was simply shredding a lot of her work. I am guessing that is how a lot of it ends up.

 

Last year, we had a new approach from Council: simply ignore the paperwork...we had this with ALL of our high adventure awards submitted for 2013 (we finally gave up and retrieved all of the paperwork recently from Council and the youth never got their patches). I submitted a recognition to our DE a couple of weeks back, and his response was essentially that he was going to turn it in the following day and it would be immediately lost. Pretty frustrating sometimes.

[Eagle92 110]

Same in my council, except I personally know the USPS office in the HQ city is extremely bad from my days as a DE. So some is that, some is council losing PW.

 

What I do is ALWAYS ( emphasis) make copies, and if at all possible, esp. if money is involved, hand deliver it.

[Daped01 61]

I realize this thread is nearly 2 years old, but i had this experience happen to me just this week. however, at the district level, not council. Our DE was going through our Charter and she said that 3 of our leaders did not have Adult applications on file, and that if we did not have them National was going to fold our pack. Well the gal that runs our pack (not sure of her exact title) told them that they were turned in and they better find them (i may have paraphrased a smidge :-) ) Our DE now turns to me as she apparently sees me as a go getter and asks if I can wrangle down the leaders and get the paperwork for them. I don't have a problem with this as the new ACM, and future CM, i figure it gives me some experience in dealing with district, and it gets me face to face more with the DL's Once the paperwork was turned into me, I faxed it to the District Service Center and asked that an email confirmation be sent to me saying they received it. not only did they send an email, they attached a scanned copy of the paperwork with notations that it had been received. I plan on keeping these copies as well just for future reference. from the stories i have read on here, i may need them.

from what I have been able to tell, our CO is a hands off type of organization. Our current leadership has had 0 scouting experience before becoming leaders. they are doing the best they can, but they stretch themselves too thin sometimes and don't give the pack the attention it needs, and organization is a big need (IMO) as I move up and into the CM position, I hope to create some organization so stuff like this doesn't happen again.

[dhendron 26]

On this note, our unit is involved in a six-month ordeal (so far) getting lost paperwork handled. We submitted some adult leader awards and two leader applications in January. All were promptly lost. Resubmitted to the DE. Lost. Contacted the DE again to get it taken care of with cc's to his supervisors...some back and forth about it from the DE, but no awards and the leader applications were not processed. Somewhere along this someone got into the leaders record, added him as a committee member in the troop (he is the chartered org rep and has never been a committee member) and took him off of the Venturing crew entirely. A few days ago, we had finally had enough and fired an email missile cc'ing everyone up to the Scout Executive. Miraculously, the leader application issue, which had appeared to be insurmountable the day before, was fixed.

 

While this was all going on, other leader and youth applications were submitted and promptly lost. We were able to get those handled within a couple of months without having to annoy the SE about it.

 

The leader awards are going nowhere still (Council says they were processed and the certs and knots left in the DE's mail, so they don't want to reprocess them...we're in a Catch 22 on that one), but at least our COR can see the unit's leaders on my.scouting.org now.

[packsaddle 753]

Daped01, thanks for bringing it back to life instead of starting a new one. Interesting to see the names in that old discussion. At one time I thought our council was unique in their inability to keep accurate records. It's a hard lesson to learn that, of all people, you even can't trust the BSA council to keep records accurately. We learned this many years ago and we don't rely on anything outside of the unit, haven't for years. If BSA consolidated all our councils into one for this state it would be just fine with us.

I once inquired as to the source of all the error and they responded that they had tremendous turnover in those clerical positions (low pay). So my thought is that if they got rid of some of that bloated, overpaid superstructure, they could afford to have better record keeping. I'm probably delusional about that though, lol.