Currently serving missionary's opinion on records

Currently serving in a spanish unit and over the past three years the records have gone from 1600 members on records to now down to 700 something. It takes the ward clerks hours and hours working on finding new addresses and they bug the missionaries for years now to track people down. The church needs to figure out a better system for their records. We have a list of over 200 people that have moved and there is no way to find them. It's not the missionaries job to even deal with it but because the ward council wants us to focus on reactivation we have to sift through all the members on records to find out who even lives there. We recently moved out a list of members we confirmed as moved and they are back in our LDS Tools again. It's just frustrating.

It's the responsibility of the entire ward council to make sure that membership records are kept accurate and up-to-date. Often, the bulk of the work is given to the clerk, because he is able to make the actual changes on the membership records. In a big ward, the clerk can't do it on his own – so it's understandable that he would turn to the missionaries for help. But in reality the entire ward council, and especially the elders quorum and Relief Society presidencies (who can use ministering as a tool) should be helping find those who are missing, and report changes to the clerk.

This is an ongoing issue for any ward I've been in. As a church, we don't have access to the same resources that law enforcement has.

Realistically, the only option is to make it easier to give up on members. But that means letting them go astray without any ward to ask for them to come back.