Opening the Office
OGIS opened September 8, 2009, with the arrival of Director Miriam Nisbet, an expert in information policy law with a distinguished career both within and outside of the Federal Government. Director Nisbet assembled a diverse staff with expertise in Open Government, Federal and state access laws, information science, mediation, journalism, and database analysis. Since May 2010, OGIS has been staffed with seven professionals including from both the agency access and the FOIA requester communities.
The OGIS web site, which went live within a few weeks of the Office opening, explains the Office's services and provides links to a wide variety of resources including guides to requesting documents under FOIA, obtaining previously released FOIA records, and seeking OGIS assistance.
The Office also created and widely distributed an OGIS fact sheet for potential customers and other interested parties (see Appendix). In the interest of transparency and accountability, OGIS case logs, which detail the cases OGIS handles, are posted weekly on this website allowing customers-and the public-to track the progress of cases. OGIS regularly hears from agency professionals who routinely read the case logs in an effort to address potential problems in their FOIA operations.
OGIS created a database to serve as an interim case management system, helping the office track cases and measure the effectiveness of its work. The Office's growing caseload demands a more robust solution for case management, and OGIS is implementing a sophisticated interactive electronic case management system.
OGIS also addressed various procedural requirements related to establishing a new Federal office by developing policies and procedures that should be published in early 2011. As required by the Privacy Act of 1974, OGIS published a new "Privacy Act System of Records Notice, NARA 40" (75 Fed. Reg. 45674, August 3, 2010), which informs the public of the types of information OGIS maintains, the procedures for accessing this information, and how OGIS safeguards the information.
OGIS created and refined its process for helping customers, both FOIA requesters and Federal agencies. When a requester contacts OGIS, the staff determines whether the individual seeks personal records. Such "first-party" requests are considered Privacy Act requests and thus fall outside the scope of the Office's mission. In its ombudsman role, OGIS has succeeded in assisting those requesters with determining the status of their requests or appeals or directing them to other entities such as the courts or state agencies.
Once OGIS opens a case, it is assigned to an OGIS staff member who fact finds with the requester and the agency and works to resolve the dispute. Each agency's FOIA Public Liaison, who has a statutory role to assist in resolving disputes, is usually the Office's first point of agency contact.
In aiming to complement agency practice, OGIS encourages customers to allow FOIA's administrative procedures to work whenever possible. Although customers can contact OGIS at any point in the administrative process, the Office encourages them to wait for the agency's appeal determination before engaging OGIS. But OGIS recognizes that, in cases of lengthy delays at the request or appeal stage or a breakdown of communications between requester and agency, such advice is not always practical.
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When General Motors declared bankruptcy and canceled its contract with the Stillwater Mining Company, Al Knauber, editor of the Big Timber Pioneer, noticed an effect on his small town of Big Timber, Montana. Wanting to know more, Knauber submitted a FOIA request to the Department of the Treasury in January 2010. Knauber, hoping to get a better picture of why the contract was cancelled, asked the Treasury Department's Office of Financial Stability (OFS)-the office that oversees the Federal Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP-or correspondence between GM and any Federal agency. The search returned only a few e-mails, surprising Knauber who thought there were far more records in the agency. He asked OGIS to look into it. A call to the OFS showed that there were a lot more records related to the Stillwater Mining Company and GM held by the OFS, but they were not correspondence between the agency and GM, which is what Knauber had specifically asked for. The office suggested that Knauber broaden the scope of his request to include internal agency documents and correspondence so the remaining records could be properly processed and released. Knauber was glad to hear there were more records and that he simply had to rewrite his request. He submitted a new request in July and received 88 pages of records two months later. "Without the assistance of your office, I would have been left to start over," Knauber wrote OGIS in an e-mail. |
OGIS CASE STUDY
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