State Services Commissioner Peter Hughes today released Official Information Act statistics for the six months to December 2019.

The latest statistics cover 114 agencies that collectively completed 19,829 official information requests between July and December 2019, a 7.8% increase in volume on the previous six months.

In the six months to December, 57 agencies completed 100% of their OIA requests within the legislated timeframe. Overall, agencies responded to 19,383, or 97.8%, of requests on time, compared with the 97.4% requests answered on time in the January to June 2019 period.

Since 2015 when the Commission started collecting OIA data there has been overall improvement in OIA requests being completed on time.

“This is another good result overall,” said Mr Hughes. “The public service has responded to nearly 98% of OIA requests on time. That is good but I expect agencies to continue to work hard to make official information more freely available.”

More agencies are also releasing their OIA responses publicly. Of the 114 agencies, 49 have published OIA responses on their websites. In total, 1788 OIA responses were published during the six months, an 8.1% increase on the previous period. (1654 during the first half of 2019).

In the six months to December 2019, the number of complaints to the Ombudsman notified to agencies decreased 9.1%, down from 208 to 189. A total of 24 final opinions were made by the Ombudsman against agencies, an 11.1% decrease on the previous period (27 during the January-June 2019 period).

The latest Ombudsman’s data is also available.

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