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Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

The Ten Oldest Pending FOIA Requests

The National Security Archive
Freedom of Information Act Audit

 
Press Release
Executive Summary
The Ten Oldest FOIA Requests in the Federal Government
Chart - Agency Response Times
Table - Oldest Outstanding FOIA Requests
Methodology
Findings Regarding The Ten Oldest FOIA Requests and FOIA Backlogs
Summary Discussion of Individual Agencies
Update on Phase One: The Ashcroft Memorandum
FOIA Audit Phase One: The Ashcroft Memo

 

 

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NOTES


1. A number of factors related to agency processing, recordkeeping and reporting make it difficult to determine the Ten Oldest FOIA Requests pending throughout the entire Federal Government. This Audit is limited to 35 agencies that account for over 97% of all FOIA requests received, but some agencies are not represented. Further, decentralization within agencies, the virtually unmonitored referral system, and recordkeeping limitations made it difficult for each of those agencies to determine with complete accuracy their own Ten Oldest FOIA Requests. The requests included in this Audit Report are those that the agencies themselves have identified as their ten oldest "currently being processed or held pending coordination with other agencies." The Archive has excluded from this list of the oldest of the oldest those requests that it has learned already have been filled. In addition, where apparent from the request, the Archive has calculated the age of the requests on this list of the oldest of the oldest from the date the request was referred to the agency that produced the request, which in some cases is several years after the date the request was originally submitted by the requester.

2. Individual FOIA annual reports are required by E-FOIA to be available on each agency's own Web site. See 5 U.S.C. Sec. 552(e)(2). Alternatively, the annual reports are all collected on the DOJ Web site at http://www.usdoj.gov/04foia/04_6.html and in a database assembled by the Public Citizen Litigation Group at http://www.citizen.org/litigation/free_info/foic_aids/articles.cfm?ID=6347.

3. See 5 U.S.C. § 552(e), as amended by Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments of 1996, 5 U.S.C.A. § 552(e) (West Supp. 1997).

4. H.R. Rep. No. 104-795, at 27-29 (1996) (emphasis added).

5. The first of these GAO studies primarily focused on (1) the E-FOIA requirement to make certain categories of information available to the public electronically, and (2) the quality of the annual FOIA reports that are required to be prepared after the end of each fiscal year by all agencies. Progress in Implementing the 1996 Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments (March 2001). The second report focused more heavily on processing times and the quality of the annual FOIA reports prepared by each agency and department. Update on the Implementation of the 1996 Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments (August 2002). The third report focused on the impact of Attorney General's October 12, 2001 Memorandum on FOIA processing. Agency Views on Changes Resulting from New Administration Policy (September 2003). Among GAO's findings after review of the agency statutorily-mandated annual reports of FOIA statistics was that they suffer from poor data quality and other reporting discrepancies. 2002 GAO Report at 59

6. The House Report accompanying the 1996 Amendments to the FOIA explains "[t]he Committee elected to use medians as a statistical measure because of their appropriateness when the measure being summarized does not have a normal distribution, or when a few cases of extreme value would skew an average. For example, a few requests for excessively large numbers of documents could artificially inflate the average time taken to fill a request." H.R. Rep. No. 104-795, at 29 (1996).

7. Efforts at reducing the burden of responding to FOIA requests are becoming more common in the Federal Government. For example, the Office of Foreign Asset Control of the Department of Treasury has decided to routinely publish information about civil penalties and informal settlements. In response to comments that the information is available under FOIA, OFAC stated that it "has found, however, that processing FOIA requests for this type of information on an ad hoc basis is not the most efficient use of its limited resources." 68 Fed. Reg. 6820, 6821 (Feb. 11, 2003).

8. The EPA FOIA Taskforce Report is available at http://www.epa.gov/foia/docs/Finaltaskforce.pdf (reviewed on September 22, 2003).

9. As noted in endnote i, the requests included in this Audit Report are those that the agencies themselves have identified as their ten oldest "currently being processed or held pending coordination with other agencies." Please see the individual agency summaries for additional information concerning the scope of the search and limitations placed on the request by the Archive and/or individual agencies.

 

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