Information newsletter
Issue 4(16), April 2005

Request experiences: How easy it is to receive obviously public information
Fany Davidova, AIP

The team of AIP has started the preparation of a handbook called "How to Provide Acess to Public Information." The handbook is intended to assist those public officials authorized to provide access to information under the APIA. In order to make this a really useful tool which could be meaningfully help information officials, we attempted to learn how some of the most interesting public authorities have set up the process of information provision.

With access to information applications we requested from twenty two institutions electronic copies of their internal rules or guidelines, regulating the procedures for public information provision. The access fees for electronic copies is exactly 1,22 Lev (0,65 Euro) according to an order of the Minister of finance.

The outcomes from the twenty-two requests follwed three different scenarios:

Scenario №1 - ”Why make it simple, when it can be hard”

This is often the scenario in institutions which have not gone through a request and information provision procedure. In those cases, officials who are responsible for deciding on access to information requests are determined to do everything possible and fulfill their duties.

This scenario usually involves an average of 5 phone calls per day, for a number of very typical purposes:

а) the official requesting from you to appear exactly on the fouteenth day after the request has been received. The Access to Public Information Act says "fourteen days" and they believe that it will be a breach of the law if information is handed to you on the fifteenth day;

b) the official asks that you resubmit the request and indicate that you wish to receive a paper copy of the requested information. Otherwise, if you insist on obtaining a floppy disk, the law wil have to be breached again, since they don't have floppy disks;

c) the official is pretty worried, because he cannot put a a stamp "true to the original" on every document written on a floppy disk. There is no way of convincing him/her that this is not a requirement of the law. As a solution, the official prints the documents, stamps them as "true to the original" and finally scans them back into the computer. There is a way around everything!

Scenario №2 - “Rather die than violate the rules”

Following this scenario, public officials are ususlly determined to blindly follow some bad procedures, even if this doubles their work and efforts. Typically, one of the following situations occurs:

а) Even if you request information which is obviously public by law (e.g. contained in public registers), it requires a staff meeting, consultation with a lawyer and a two-page decision, establishing and supporting with detailed legal arguments your right to access government held information.

b) It might turn out, that the official who took the decision for information disclosure is different from the one who would physically provide the documents. The internal rules of the institution might require that both of them are present, and that you also find the clerk, who has to issue a receipt. You have to spend your time looking for all of them in the lobbies, making sure none of them is missing, and it wouldn't matter that they already tood a decision to disclose the information and the documents have long been copied. If the internal rules require it - it's the end of story!

c) You might, after receiving the disclosure decision, wish to pay the access fee at the cashier’s desk. It might turn out however, that the cashier has gone to the bank and no one knows when he/she will return. No other official, even if s/he is a cashier, can accept your payment. All your efforts to convince the officials that you are in a hurry will be in vain. You might think of leaving 1,20 Lev, because you actually don’t need a receipt. Again no one would accept it – as if you don’t know, this is a violation of the rules.

d) If the disclosure decision states that you should make a bank transfer, there is no way to pay at a desk within the institution.

The arguments that the bank fees are usually higher than the document copying expenses will again have no effect. If the internal rules say bank transfer, even God coming down to persuade the officials that you should pay at the cashier will be of little help!

Scenario №3 - “With minimum effort”

There are, in fact, administrations, which not always blindly follow the procedures, when they need to adequately and effectively provide information. The Ministry of Finance, The Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Privatization agency, the Ministry of Forestry and Agriculture did send us short disclosure letters and attached a floppy disk with the requested information. Indeed, this meant that each of these institutions had given us one floppy disk for free. But they skipped the useless phone calls, and saved their officials' time, which would otherwise have been used to run around the corridors, looking for their missing colleagues, signing protocols, issuing receipts, etc.

At the end of the day, AIP received most of the requested information – whether with little effort, or more than a little effort. This experience convinced us that the Handbook How to Provide Access to Information would be useful for the administration.

Note

Honestly, some authorities deserve to be pert of Scenario №3 - “With minimum efforts”. These are the institutions, who never made an effort to respond to our information requests: the National Agricultural Fund, the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Regional Development and Public Works, the Customs Agency, and the Roads Executive Agency.