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Annual Report 2008 - Text

Time Taken to Complete Reviews

My Office completed 259 reviews in 2008 which are broken down in the table below according to the year in which the case was received by my Office.

The FOI Act provides that reviews by my Office should be completed as soon as may be and, insofar as practicable, not later than four months after receipt of the application. In previous reports, my Office has reported on completion times based on applications received in the calendar year being reported on, rather than on the number of reviews completed in that year. I believe that greater clarity can be achieved by analysing the number of reviews completed. Thus, of the 259 reviews completed in 2008 (see table below), 88 or 34% of those reviews were competed within four months of acceptance. A comparison with previous statistics in not possible in the circumstances. However, when we come to the annual report for 2009, a comparison with the 2008 figure will, of course, be included.

For the record, and to finalise the comparison base on applications received during 2008, of the total of 228 reviews which were received and accepted in 2008, 107 or 47% of these were completed during 2008 and 62 or 27% were completed within the four month time limit. This represented an increase on the 25% achieved on applications received and accepted in 2007.

It is important to bear in mind that reviews of FOI decisions often involve complex issues and/or a large number of records which can take considerably longer to deal with than the four month time limit envisaged by the FOI Act. However, now that the backlog of older cases has been reduced significantly, my Office is better placed to concentrate on reviews as they are received.

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