Fiji's caretaker Cabinet has approved the overhaul of the Government's financial information system following the embarrassing admission that the Finance Ministry lost all last year's financial records.

The records were apparently wiped from memory banks at the Fijian Government's computer centre because of a programming error.

The Fiji Government's entire fiscal records for the year 2000 have had to be painstakingly reassembled with each of the 52 government departments and agencies manually resubmitting all their data to the Government's computer centre.

Fiji's Finance Secretary, Solomone Kotobalavu, says to avoid a recurrence of what he described as a "technical error of unprecedented magnitude", the caretaker government had approved the replacement of the current financial information system, which was put into place in the mid 1970s.

ABC News

-- Anonymous, July 08, 2001