FOIA Advisor

FOIA News: FOIA personnel taxed by workload, survey reveals

FOIA News (2015-2023)Allan BlutsteinComment

Stacks on Stacks: Survey Shows Increased FOIA Requests Still a Challenge

By Jim Gil, Ipro, July 31, 2020

eDiscovery-Blues-Cartoon-10-FOIA-Stacks-on-Stacks-scaled.jpg

Today’s eDiscovery Blues cartoon gives a nod to our colleagues working in government agencies processing FOIA requests. By law, all federal agencies are required to respond to a FOIA request within 20 business days, unless there are “unusual circumstances.”

The number of requests per year has continued to rise over the past decade, with 858,952 requests in FY 2019 alone, according to the DOJ. Along with this rise in requests, comes an increase in data to search through. So not only are more requests coming in, there is a larger data landscape to sift through in order to find relevant documents.

Read more here.