Fees in your country?

[Michael Morisy]

Hi,

The US is reevaluating its current fee-for-request system: Currently,
agencies can charge the hourly rate of staff for processing a request,
plus 10 cents a page.

Part of this report including taking a look at how other countries
handle fees: They put together the attached chart, which while maybe
technically accurate, seems to be far away from the circumstances in
place for most Alaveteli-hosting countries. So my question:

— Does this chart look accurate?
— Are fee issues a problem in your country, and if so how do you handle
them?

Thanks!

Michael from MuckRock
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Michael Morisy
Phone: 1-857-488-3081 | AIM: MMorisy
GTalk: mor...@gmail.com | Twitter: @morisy
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[Michael Morisy]

The 3 pg report that chart was from in case anyone is interested:

https://ogis.archives.gov/Assets/foia-fees-committee-status-2015-01-27.pdf?method=1

> Email had 1 attachment:
> + image.jpg
> 675k (image/jpeg)

[Rowan Crawford]

NZ's regime is to charge after a free hour — in practice there's not many charges being applied. You could be forgiven for suspecting enforcing the charge is more often to do with the nature of the request than its relative effort.

Rowan

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[James McKinney]

Yes, fees are an issue in Canada at the federal level. It’s definitely $5 to submit a request, and there can definitely be significant fees if the request can’t be fulfilled within the allocated time (e.g. if there needs to be significant redaction).

Some provinces charge no fee to submit a request. Others do. I’ve never heard of a successful fee waiver - not to say they don’t happen.

I think there had been studies showing that it costs more than $5 to collect, process, etc. the $5. I can try to find them if interested. From what I can tell, the $5 doesn’t serve as a disincentive to submit a request.

Cheers,

James

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[Fabrizio Scrollini]

In Uruguay while technically possible, fees are not an issue .

[Matthew Landauer]

The table is a fair reflection of the status-quo in the Australian Federal FOI system. Making requests is free. In practise agencies take every opportunity to impose charges when they can. We do occasionally see reduction in charges for reasons of public interest but this only happens if the requestor knows the right words to use and pesters sufficiently.

Here is my very favourite graph relevant to charges for our FOI system. It says so much.

I think this graph compensates for inflation.

It shows how the internal costs have sky-rocketed over recent years while the number of requests hasn't changed that much. One can only guess for the reasons for this. Inefficient (or non existent) document management systems? No easy way of them dealing with the explosion in electronic communication? More use of expensive external lawyers? 

There's one more super important data point to add to that - In 2012/13 the *total* amount collected in charges for all federal agencies was $236,754. So what's collected in charges is the tiniest fraction of what the supposed internal costs are.

From a government point of view charging regimes do not help pay for the internal costs associated with FOI requests. Anyone claiming that is misinformed or trying to mislead.

What they do is dissuade people from making requests in the first place and the losses to democracy and accountability of that are unknown.

Hope that helps.

All the best,

Matthew

P.S. For more on that data read the last full OAIC annual report http://www.oaic.gov.au/about-us/corporate-information/annual-reports/oaic-annual-report-201213/

[Michael Morisy]

Thank you so much Matthew and everyone else who responded. How does your site deal with that when it comes to Alavateli? Are requests just dropped, or do the requesters pay directly?

[Matthew Landauer]

On https://www.righttoknow.org.au/ it's up to individual requesters to organise payments. I think that's how most other people are running Alaveteli sites too.

All the best,

Matthew

[James McKinney]

Our site is just for the province of Quebec, which doesn’t charge fees to make requests. There hasn’t been a case yet where a request led to processing fees (there have been very few requests - another story).

[Louise Crow]

For WhatDoTheyKnow in the UK, our help page says:

"Authorities often include unnecessary, scary, boilerplate in acknowledgement messages saying they “may” charge a fee. Ignore such notices. They hardly ever will actually charge a fee. If they do, they can only charge you if you have specifically agreed in advance to pay. More details from the Information Commissioner.

Sometimes an authority will refuse your request, saying that the cost of handling it exceeds £600 (for central government) or £450 (for all other public authorities). At this point you can refine your request, e.g. it would be much cheaper for an authority to tell you the amount spent on marshmallows in the past year than in the past ten years."

Perhaps one of our vounteers can comment on what their sense of the current level of charging is. 

Cheers

Louise

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[Andrei Cristian Petcu]

> Our site is just for the province of Quebec, which doesn’t charge fees
> to make requests. There hasn’t been a case yet where a request led to
> processing fees (there have been very few requests - another story).

In Romania there are no fees for FOI.

Andrei Petcu