If you’ve been a FOIA professional long enough, you’ve been papered. It makes one feel like the homeowner who discovers a toilet-papered yard the morning after Halloween – all trick, no treat. For FOIA professionals who haven’t been papered, here’s how it works: a requester will flood email inboxes, mail boxes and yes, even fax … Continue reading No Treat for Papering Agencies
FOIA’s Exemption 4 protects from disclosure commercial and financial information provided to the government by individuals and a wide range of entities – from corporations and banks to Native American tribes. The idea is to safeguard certain private business records in government files. About two dozen representatives of the agency and requester communities participated in … Continue reading Tips on Getting Down to Business
We’re pleased that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) recently proposed a new job series that would cover Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) professionals. OPM has asked Federal agencies to submit comments regarding the draft Position Classification for the proposed job series by October 31st. In a nutshell, OPM proposes an occupational series, GS-0306, titled … Continue reading OPM Seeks Agency Comment on New FOIA Job Series
Coinciding nicely with the recent convening of the Open Government Partnership, a global effort to make governments more transparent, effective and accountable, OGIS Director Miriam Nisbet is privileged to have traveled to China recently to meet with government officials and university faculty and students in conjunction with Yale Law School’s China Law Center. The context … Continue reading Reaching Out
Interested in contractor and other business-related records in the FOIA context? OGIS and the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy are gearing up to host the next FOIA Requester Roundtable from 10 a.m. to noon Wednesday Oct. 19, 2011. The roundtable will be at OIP, 1425 New York Ave. NW, Suite 11050, Washington DC, … Continue reading Gather ’Round
After two years of providing mediation services and working to improve the FOIA process, it’s time for self examination. During the last two years we’ve focused on figuring out how to do what we do while we were doing it. Our customers and stakeholders have provided valuable feedback regarding how we’ve helped them and how … Continue reading Onward and Upward!
When Elvis sang “Twenty Days and Twenty Nights” he didn’t have FOIA in mind. But the title refrain is sure to spark many in the FOIA community to think about the statutory requirement that agencies respond to requests within 20 business days (5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(6)(A)). It’s a topic that has many OGIS requester customers … Continue reading Twenty days … or not
When Congress created OGIS in 2007, it did so by adding 104 words to the Freedom of Information Act. What Congress didn’t do was dictate how OGIS would provide mediation services or review agency FOIA policies, procedures and compliance or recommend policy changes to Congress and the President to improve FOIA. That’s typically left for … Continue reading Regarding Rulemaking
We here at OGIS were so busy earlier in September that we missed a big one: OGIS’s second birthday. That’s saying something for a team that includes some talented bakers and chocolate aficionados. Two years ago, OGIS Director Miriam Nisbet walked into an empty office with a big congressional mandate: offer mediation services to resolve … Continue reading Happy (Belated) Birthday OGIS!
Both the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the Privacy Act contain provisions that grant a right of access to Federal records. FOIA applies to records of executive branch agencies on potentially any subject. The Privacy Act applies only to agencies’ records which contain information about individuals that are maintained in a “system of records,” meaning those … Continue reading The Intersection of FOIA Street and Privacy Act Lane
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