ACT government directorates strained by complex internal FOI processes

A review off the ACT's Freedom of Information Act found that complex and "overly onerous" requests can result in staff working full-time on the one request for months at a time.

Last financial year it took one directorate 446 working days to process a FOI request.

There was another request which required a full-time-equivalent worker for four months and a senior executive had to spend hundred of hours reviewing the documents. This request came from a member of the Legislative Assembly.

The review, conducted by Deloitte, recommended that temporarily funded FOI processing roles be made permanent and this would help maintain transparency and accountability.

But only one temporary full-time-equivalent role across the ACT government directorates has been funded permanently since the review was presented to government more than one year ago.

The Deloitte review of the FOI act was published in November 2020 but has only recently been made available through a freedom of information request.

The ACT government passed a Freedom of Information Act in 2016, which officially came into effect in January 2018. The point of the new act was to make information held by the government more accessible to the community.

However, there was a "marked increase" in the number of requests that were declined in the 2020-21 financial year. An annual report on the operation of the territory's FOI act showed there had been 83 decisions to not publish open access information, compared to only 11 in the previous year.

The number of FOI requests has grown steadily, with 918 applications last financial year, up from 912 the year before.

"The increase in FOI requests and new open access publication requirements have placed considerable pressure on directorate resources, requiring new temporary and permanent positions to be created to ensure compliance with statutory obligations," the Deloitte review said.

At the time of the review there were 32 full-time equivalent employees working on processing freedom of information requests. Of those, 13 were temporary positions and the report recommended these positions be made a permanent role.

"Having a large percentage of the workforce temporarily funded can have a negative impact on staff retention, productivity and effectiveness," the Deloitte report said.

However, most government directorates have not permanently funded temporary roles since the report was completed.

The only directorate that has funded a full-time temporary role since the review was released in November 2020 is Transport Canberra and City Services.

The Canberra Liberals' Peter Cain expressed concerns the act wasn't working as intended.

"It's got a good policy driver to increase transparency of government and make it easier for the community to access information but if the resourcing is inadequate the departments can't meet that good policy driver," Mr Cain said.

The Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate has four full-time employees working on requests. This is followed by the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate and ACT Health which both have three full-time workers.

Transport Canberra and City Services has two full-time workers that process FOI requests and there is also an administrative support worker. There are 2.4 full-time-equivalent workers who process FOI requests in the Education Directorate.

But the Community Services Directorate has by far the largest number of staff who process FOI requests with 16 full-time-equivalent workers.

The Deloitte report said the Community Services Directorate often received complicated applications that could take up to 20 months to finalise.

It was recommended that there should be additional resource that was purely dedicated to reducing the process time of less complicated requests in the Community Services Directorate.

MORE A.C.T. POLITICS NEWS:

"CSD receives a large amount of applications relating to personal affairs. These applications are generally more complex and take time to gather the required information, process the application and review the information," the Deloitte review said.

"The complexity of client file requests has an impact on the processing of smaller, non complex requests, which are placed in a queue for processing."

In the 2020-21 financial year, the Community Services Directorate had a FOI that took 446 working days to process.

"This was a complex application comprising of over 12,882 pages of information and requiring coordination across a range of agencies," a Community Services Directorate spokeswoman said.

"CSD receives the highest amount of personal FOI access applications across the ACT government. Over 65 per cent of the active FOI access applications being decided by CSD are considered extremely large, exceeding 3480 pages and up to 40,000 pages."

The Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate had one FOI that took 109 working days to complete.

The longest processing time for a request for the Education Directorate was 86 days and it took Transport Canberra and City Services 68 days to process a request.

Mr Cain said the process for assessing needed to be centralised, however, the Deloitte review showed there was little appetite for this to occur.

"We need a centralised FOI administration and we need full-time officers that can meet the intention of the act, which is to reveal more of government workings to the community," he said.

Send us a Letter to the Editor

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: