Fergie's Tech Blog

Feds Taking Longer to Answer FOIA Requests

An AP newswire article by Michael J. Sniffen, via The Boston Globe, reports that:

Citizens, groups and corporations are putting in fewer requests for information from the federal government, but it's taking longer to get an answer and they get turned down more often, a study reported Friday.

In a study of 13 Cabinet departments and nine agencies, the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government found that the number of unprocessed requests rose from 104,225 at the end of fiscal 2004 to 148,603 at the end of fiscal 2005 on Sept. 30, 2005.

Meantime, the number of requests that were processed between 2004 and 2005 dropped from 522,817 to 477,937. As a result, unprocessed requests rose from 20 percent of the total processed to 31 percent.

posted by Fergie @ 6/30/2006 05:52:00 PM