The FOIA Ombudsman

As 2011 comes to a close, we at OGIS are taking some time to reflect on our second full year of operations. We are happy to report that we reached some milestones this year. Our outreach program continues to take root: we developed a 5-Step FOIA Dispute Resolution Process, which we routinely present in inter-agency [...]

Back in May, we posted a recommendation on this blog regarding referrals. We’d recently had several OGIS cases in which agencies making referrals neither identified the name of the agencies to which they referred requests nor offered to assist requesters in determining the status of the referred requests. The requests appeared to have disappeared into [...]

OGIS is on the move. Since opening in September 2009, OGIS’s home has been in the National Archives’ building in College Park, Md., far from many folks outside the Archives with whom we regularly interact. On Friday December 9, we’re moving to the Federal Register building at 800 North Capitol Street in Washington, D.C. We’ll [...]

Issues involving fees comprise a small percentage of OGIS’s caseload – about 5 percent in the two years that ended September 30, 2011. While small in number, the issues are big, consuming agency resources and causing delays. Through our casework, we’ve seen agencies place requesters in the wrong fee category; misapply search, review and duplication [...]

This week, after a year in the works, OGIS launched our new website and case management system, the OGIS Access System (OAS). Our excitement over the completion of this process isn’t just sky high — we’re literally in the cloud. The new OAS will manage more effectively and efficiently the requests for assistance that FOIA [...]