I agreeto Idea To Make FOIA Work, Costs of Non-Disclosure Must Be Greater than Benefits
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To Make FOIA Work, Costs of Non-Disclosure Must Be Greater than Benefits

Why Is This Idea Important?: Right now, the only penalty in a FOIA case for non-compliance is the award of legal fees to the requester...the lawyer's time is worth money under statue, the agency's time is worth money (reasonable fees may be charged for search and copies), yet the requester's time is not worth money. But information, especially time-sensitive information, has value--and often the requester has a time value for the information. Information in 20 days may be worth more than information in 2 years, especially regarding matters of public interest that affect policy. If information may only be revealed after the issue is moot, especially in controversial matters, what was the point of FOIA in the first place? Any official doing a cost/benefit analysis right now must calculate that the risk of disclosure outweighs the risk of denial. That calculus must change for FOIA to become more effective.

Charge agencies daily substantial penalties for each day past statutory deadlines on FOIA request, this may be done by executive order, I believe. Charges should come from overall budget of agency, not FOIA department. Failure to answer FOIA requests by government officials should also be punished by individual reprimands and other administrative sanctions. These guidelines could be worked out by OPM across all agencies to be fair and reasonable--and to provide reasonable incentives for agencies to disclose whenever possible (rather than deny access, now the CYA default).

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Submitted by Laurence Jarvik 2 years ago

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Comments (2)

  1. michael.heffner

    And the money would go to whom? It doesn't make sense to take money away from government programs for this purpose.

    2 years ago
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  2. Laurence Jarvik

    That's a good point...money could go to FOIA requester, or into an escrow account to be released when documents released. You MUST take money away from programs to get an effect, indeed it would be even better to take money away from administrative budgets if possible, cut down on perks and conferences and travel and so forth, but it would be hard to work out the details...

    If there is no penalty, there is no reason to comply. Do they want their programs or to deny FOIA requests? Make agencies choose, and they will only deny information when there is a very good reason to do so. If there is no cost to denial, they will deny as a standard operating procedure.

    Incentives drive decision-making and the incentives must be changed through increasing the costs of bad decisions...imho

    2 years ago
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