Federal public service leaders have ordered a crackdown on physical inboxes as part of a push toward entirely digital offices.

The Digital Continuity 2020 Policy came out this week (hard copy not available) detailing demands for all federal agencies to put century-old record-keeping methods out to pasture.

A powerful agency boss - Department of Finance secretary Jane Halton – says managers will take a hard line, and not allow resistant staff to stay in the past.

Speaking at the policy launch this week, Halton railed against the paper plague that has taken hold across the public sector.

She said public servants must fight the “tyranny of the small person” who "wears a propeller on their hat” and stubbornly insists “no, I like it my way”.

“We are going through one of the globe's great revolutions, the digital revolution,” Ms Halton said.

She slammed hard-copy paper forms that the federal bureaucracy foists on members of the public, saying she is sick of writing her name, address and age “25 times” on simple forms for government services.

Ms Halton said the bureaucracy should “collect once, use many times”.

Under the new policy, agencies will be forced to see information as an asset, with robust procedures to create and then manage it for as long as needed, taking all the needs and risks into account.

The changes will reach into internal practices too, with agencies set to transition to entirely digital work processes. It means business processes such as authorisations and approvals will be done digitally, with all inter-office information created and managed in digital forms to make sure key data is available to other agencies.

Agency heads have been asked to find which paper records can be culled by the end of this year.

A deadline of June 2016 has been set for agencies to establish information governance committees, after which they must detail plans for how to deal with the crossover between new and old forms of information..

The digital policy says the new age of record keeping should be fully underway by the end of 2020.

The paper was put out by the National Archives, whose director-general David Fricker says digital information is needed to combat technical obsolescence.

He said government agencies must no longer “entomb pieces of paper in boxes”.

“Work processes that create and collect digital information and keep it in an accessible digital form can enable better productivity and responsiveness to client and government behaviour,” the policy said.

“Digital information that is kept in digital form is more usable and can be shared more easily and at less cost.

“Digital information kept in paper and other analogue forms can result in inefficiencies such as unnecessary duplication, increased storage costs, and unreliable or inaccessible information that cannot be easily found and cost-effectively shared or backed up for business continuity.”

Agencies will report their progress to the National Archives through an annual survey.

There will also be training sessions to help public servants make changes.