Tēnā koe,

Thank you for your response last week to my request about OIA response time statistics (OIA 1120404). I have some questions about the data that’s been released which I hope you’ll be able to clarify for me.

1. In the “How long was the extension?” column, extension lengths such as “15 days”, “2 weeks”, and “1 month” are recorded. Am I correct in interpreting these extensions as follows?

- Extensions recorded as days refer to a number of working days
- Extensions recorded in weeks are until the same day of the week a number of weeks in the future, e.g. 2 weeks from Friday the 1st of June to Friday the 15th of June
- Extensions recorded in months are until the same day of a subsequent month, e.g. 2 months from the 20th of January to the 20th of March

2. I’ve noticed some dates that appear to be incorrect. In some cases, e.g. for the date of the extension notice in cell 2E, this seems to just be that the incorrect year has been recorded. However, in other cases, such as in the response date in cell 130B, which notes that the request received on 13 Sep 17 was completed several months earlier on 7 Mar 17, I’m not certain what the correct dates should be.

As far as I’ve found, here are the rows which have inconsistent dates:

Extended after complete:
2, 3, 67, 131, 146, 160, 253

Received after complete:
130, 131, 169, 228, 260

There are also a number of requests marked as having been extended which have no extension duration recorded. I’m not sure if they have been incorrectly marked as extended, or if the extension duration was missed. These are the rows affected:
162, 181, 192, 285, 286, 308

I’m also unclear how to interpret row 229. The cell for the date it was answered contains “Clarified 21 Nov 17, extended 21 Dec 17”, but the rest of the row doesn’t contain a duration for that extension and doesn’t state the date the request was answered.

Could you please let me know what the correct entries for each of these rows should be?

3. I appreciate your note that the criteria I’ve asked for are different to those specified by the State Services Commission, so I shouldn’t expect the numbers to line up exactly. However, I’ve noticed a significant discrepancy that I’m not sure is explained by this difference.

In the same period, the SSC reports that 98.6% of OIA requests completed by the Ministry of Education were completed within the legislated timeframe. However, looking at the slightly different data provided to me for the same Q3-4 2017 period, only 70.5% of OIA requests received by the Ministry of Education appear to have been completed within the legislated timeframe.

Even when I excluded all requests that weren’t completed before 2018, and all requests that have obviously erroneous data, I still found 51 requests that do not seem to have been completed within the legislated timeframe. These requests would be a subset of the 285 requests reported by the SSC as having been completed by the Ministry of Education in this period. However, the SSC’s data reported that only 4 of those requests were not completed within the legislated timeframe.

I have manually reviewed over a dozen of these requests to ensure that the discrepancy is not due to any issue with the code I have written for analysing this data, and my findings have been consistent with the output of my code. Though some extent of this may be due to further errors in data entry, the difference is significant enough that I would be very surprised if that was entirely its cause.

Does the Ministry have any idea why the data it has released is so inconsistent with the statistics reported by the SSC in this way?

Finally, I’d like to reiterate my request that you please provide all information in an accessible, searchable format. The response letter sent on 2018-06-01 was an image-based PDF, which is an inaccessible format that does not work with screen readers and does not allow for text to be searched or copied.

In recent months I have emailed the Minister for Disability Issues about the issue of inaccessible OIA responses, and she responded with the message that “Providing OIA responses in accessible format should be standard practice as part of an open and transparent government”.

Ngā mihi,
Mark Hanna

Tēnā koe,

A response to my OIA request of the 7th of June (ref 1120404) was due no later than the 5th of July (not the 6th of July, as stated in the response I received on the 11th of June). However, it is now the 10th of July and I have not yet received any response.

Please send the response immediately. If a response has not yet been prepared, I should have received a notification no later than the 5th of July telling me how much more time is necessary and why 20 working days was not enough time.

I intend to lay a complaint with the Office of the Ombudsman regarding this delayed deemed refusal.

Nāku, na,
Mark Hanna