April 22, 2013
Each year the Department of Justice submits a report to Congress detailing its efforts to encourage agency compliance with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The FOIA Litigation and Compliance Report describes the different ways in which the Office of Information Policy (OIP) works to provide training, guidance, and counseling to agencies to assist them in their administration of the FOIA.
As detailed in the report, during 2012 the Department issued guidance on several topics designed to improve FOIA administration and to further promote the directives contained within President Obama’s Memorandum on the FOIA and Attorney General Holder’s FOIA Guidelines. This guidance included:
- New procedures on the implementation of the FOIA's statutory law enforcement exclusion provisions designed to bring greater accountability and transparency to their existence and use without compromising the important national security and law enforcement interests that are at stake;
- Renewed focus on the importance of agencies closing their 10 oldest pending requests and consultations each year; and
- Direction to agencies based upon OIP's assessment of agency progress in 2012 (PDF), including use of more advanced technology to assist in core processing tasks and establishment of multi-track FOIA processing queues to improve processing time for "simple" track requests and provide requesters with the option of tailoring their requests so that they fit within the track that can be processed more quickly.
Topic(s):
FOIA
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