The OIA is broken, but we are not keeping track of how badly

Wednesday, 17 April 2019

Senior reporter Andrea Vance demonstrates how to seek information using the Official Information Act.

Data on the amount of information being withheld from the public under the Official Information Act (OIA), is sorely lacking, Stuff's Redacted series has found. Data journalist Andy Fyers looks at the data available on the OIA and what it means.

(And remember Government consultation on how the OIA is working close today. You can offer feedback here).

To get a sense of how often public organisations refuse or partly refuse to release information that is requested under the Act we asked many of the top public organisations for the details on how they respond to OIAs.

What we found is a rather large big gap in our understanding of the extent to which OIA requests are partly or completely refused. While there are official statistics on timeliness and complaints they only paint a partial picture of the health of the OIA.

What did Stuff ask for?

We surveyed 37 major Government departments and Crown entities, to ask how many OIA requests they received and how many of those they refused in full, refused in part and granted in full in each of the past two years. Please note, this was meant only to provide a snapshot, not a definitive statistical analysis of the OIA.

* How your information is hidden

* Your Official Information Act experience

* Official Information Act users face being unmasked

* Still time to speak up on whistleblowing reforms, says State Services Commission**

What did the survey reveal?

The response was patchy at best. One third of organisations did not tell us how many OIA requests they received in the last two years.

Only 13 could provide a breakdown of how many were refused in full, in part or refused completely.

Collectively, these 13 organisations received 5420 requests in the most recent year they had data for (some provided data for calendar years, others for financial years).

Of these, 77 per cent were granted in full, 14 per cent declined in part (such as redactions) and nine per cent were declined in full.

Can we draw any conclusions from these figures?

The data is not close to complete enough to draw any meaningful conclusions.

Most of the 5420 OIAs in our sample were to the Department of Corrections, so the figures are weighted massively by their performance (they granted 88 per cent of requests in full) and it would be wrong to assume rates are similar for other organisations.

There was significant variation in rates between organisations who did respond.

Want to keep an eye on your local MP? This video will explain how the OIA can help.

The Education Review Office (ERO) granted about 90 per cent of requests in full, while the Defence Force and Inland Revenue granted less than 50 per cent in full and refused more than 20 per cent outright.

Why are some organisations better at releasing information in full?

There are legitimate reasons why some respond to requests in full more often than others – some simply hold more sensitive information than others or might receive more requests that would take an unreasonable amount of time and effort to fulfil (this is a reason to decline requests under the Act).

But the State Services Commission (SSC) said statistics show the performance of the OIA is improving?

The SSC releases statistics on whether requests were responded to on time (within 20 working days).

Data for the second half of 2018 came out in March. It shows that 95 per cent of requests are responded to on time. There has been a slight improvement since 2015/16 when 91 per cent of requests were responded to on time.

Although, just because a request is responded within the 20 days, does not always mean it is also responded to 'as soon as reasonably practicable', which is also requirement under the Act.

And this data tell us nothing about the quality of the replies.

What other data is kept on the OIA?

The Ombudsman, who oversees the OIA system, records data on the number of complaints they receive, who is making them and the outcomes.

What does it tell us about the health of the system?

The number of complaints received by the Ombudsman has been tracking up steadily since 2016.

There were 723* in the second half of 2018, a 20 per cent increase on the 598 received in the second half of 2016.

Complaints have generally been increasing at a faster rate than OIA requests during this time. The exception was the second half of 2018 when there was a big spike in requests.

Redacted: Why you aren't getting the information you're entitled to.

About half of complaints received by the Ombudsman relate to refusals in full or in part. Most are made by individuals (70 per cent), with another 20 per cent from media.

What more can be done?

For starters, an introduction of a system for tracking how OIAs are responded to in New Zealand would be useful.

If the quality of replies (declined in full, declined in part [redacted] and granted), were tracked in aggregate, across the entire public sector, as they are with timeliness of responses, we would have a fuller picture of the true health of OIA.

* The 2018 figure excludes some 471 complaints made by a single individual relating to OIAs to school boards of trustees.