Through our investigations, it's quite rare that we would conclude that a file has gone missing.
Files get lost, records don't get found, poor search practices are in place, and there's mismanagement of records. Alvin Toffler, whom I referred to earlier, coined the phrase “information overload”. Right now across government there is an information management crisis, so files going missing is probably not an uncommon thing. Whether they go missing deliberately is another issue.