Fiscal Year 2017 FOIA Data Available Now on FOIA.gov
Dep't of Justice, Office of Info. Pol'y Blog, Mar. 9, 2018
The Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy is pleased to announce that all 116 agencies subject to the FOIA have finalized their Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 Annual FOIA Reports and these reports are now available on FOIA.gov.
Each year, federal departments and agencies are required by law to submit a report to the Attorney General detailing various statistics regarding their agency’s FOIA activities, such as the numbers of requests processed and received, and the time taken to process them. The data from all of these Annual FOIA Reports is then uploaded onto FOIA.gov, the Justice Department’s government-wide FOIA resource, so that the public can easily view it and compare FOIA data by agency and over time.
OIP is currently in the process of compiling its Summary of Agency Annual FOIA Reports for FY 2017, however, from the data uploaded onto FOIA.gov we can already see that demand for FOIA continued to increase in FY 2017 with a record high 818,271 incoming requests.
Read more here.
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2017 FOIA Litigation and Compliance Report Now Available
Dep't of Justice, Office of Info. Pol'y Blog, Mar. 9, 2018
Last Friday, OIP posted the Department’s 2017 FOIA Litigation and Compliance Report. In accordance with the FOIA, each year the Department of Justice submits to Congress and the President a report detailing our efforts to encourage agency compliance with the FOIA. The report also contains a listing of all FOIA litigation cases received and decided in the prior calendar year. The report highlights the many ways that OIP works to provide guidance, trainings, and counseling to agencies to assist them in their FOIA administration and to promote agency accountability.
This year's report once again summarizes new policy guidance issued by OIP, which for 2017 includes:
- Defining a “Record” Under the FOIA
- Updated Department of Justice Handbook for Agency Annual Freedom of Information Act Reports
- Guidance for Further Improvement Based on 2017 Chief FOIA Officer Report Review and Assessment
- Processing Reminders for the Last Quarter of Fiscal Year 2017
- Guidelines for 2018 Chief FOIA Officer Reports
- Agency FOIA Websites 2.0
Read more here.