Freedom foiled in FoI audit
An audit of the administration of the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has recommended that OAIC publish a statement of its regulatory approach based on the issues raised when entities fail to comply with the Act.
In his report, Administration of the Freedom of Information Act 1982, Auditor-General, Grant Hehir (pictured) examined the treatment of FoI requests by three Agencies - the Attorney-General's Department, Department of Social Services and the Department of Veterans' Affairs.
He said the objective of the audit was to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of entities’ implementation of the FoI Act.
Mr Hehir found that while the Agencies' administration of FoI was "generally effective", claims for exemptions had risen 68.4 per cent in the past five years with exemptions for ‘certain operations’ and ‘national security’ increasing by 318 and 247 per cent respectively.
“While the proportion of applications where access is refused has remained relatively stable at around 10 per cent, the number of exemptions from release being claimed by all entities across the Commonwealth has increased by 68.4 per cent over the last five years,” Mr Hehir said.
In addition, he found that the time required to conduct a merit review varied substantially, with the elapsed time for decisions reported by OAIC in 2015–16 ranging from 81 to 1,228 days, which was an average of 372 days.
“There is very limited quality assurance or verification of the reliability of FOI data reported to OAIC by entities,” Mr Hehir said.
“None of the three selected entities fully complied with the FoI Act requirement to publish specific required information as part of the Information Publication Scheme (IPS).”
In addition, none of the three selected entities, nor OAIC itself, met the FoI Act requirement to review the operation of the IPS in its entity by 1 May 2016.
The Auditor-General's 59-page report can be accessed at this PS News link and the audit team was Julian Mallett, Brendan Mason, Rebecca Walker, Emily Arthur, Andrew Rodrigues and Paul Bryan.
Comments