OKLAHOMA CITY - The chairman of a church panel studying the sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church said that obtaining an accurate accounting of all priests and children involved would be a challenge because some church officials had been "slovenly to the point of reckless" in their record keeping.

The chairman, Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma, who leads the National Review Board established by the bishops in June to monitor their response to the abuse crisis, said his group had contacted some of the nation's 194 dioceses to assess their files on abuse. In this early step in producing a nationwide study outlining the scope of the crisis, the board has found some records "inadequate," Keating said.

"How much of that is the result of the passing of time or ignorance and neglect, and how much of it is a conspiracy of silence, remains to be seen," Keating said in an interview here.

Keating's criticism of the record-keeping by some bishops underlines the obstacles that the review board faces as it begins its work.

In the seven months since the bishops announced the creation of the 13-member board, the governor has vowed that he and other members would demand accountability from bishops whose negligent supervision of priests resulted in the victimization of children.

But many bishops have guarded their files jealously, and Keating has no power to make them turn the files over. Church officials with whom he must work closely, including a former assistant director of the FBI hired last month by the bishops, call for more accountability less bluntly than Keating does. Some church officials in Rome and the United States are quietly critical of Keating's zeal.

In recent weeks, several Vatican officials, speaking anonymously, have criticized Keating, who is Catholic but has said he admires Martin Luther. The Vatican has called him a self-promoting politician who is using the church as a whipping boy.

Keating called those accusations outrageous, pointing out that because of term limits he would step down as governor this month and had accepted an insurance industry post. But he acknowledged hearing "through various grapevines" that some American bishops have criticized him for saying that prelates who transferred pedophile priests to new parishes should resign.

Still, Keating said, most bishops were cooperating with the review board's mission, which was laid out in the Charter for the Protection of Children adopted in June by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Under the order of a federal judge, the Boston Archdiocese released documents this week that showed it had allowed priests accused of abuse to remain in ministry or failed to persuade them to receive residential psychiatric treatment.

Robert S. Bennett, a Washington lawyer who is chairman of one of the review board's subcommittees, said in a statement Friday that the board would begin its questioning of cardinals, archbishops and bishops because it was "troubled about recent public revelations which suggest that past abuse and how it was handled was more aggravated than previously thought."