Report 24 - Access to Information Review Task Force

AN ANALYSIS OF FEES FOR ACCESS TO INFORMATION REQUESTS

2.0 Findings

2.1 Total Fees Payable

The distribution of fees payable is presented in Table 2. The vast majority of requests (85%) fell into the $5 to $25 range. In fact for 26% of the requests the only recorded fee payable was the application fee. The overall median fee payable was $7, in other words half the requests had fees less than $7 and half the requests had fees over $7. The mean fee, however, was $25 due to the substantially higher fees associated with a small number of requests. In fact 3% of the requests (those with fees of $101 dollars or more) accounted for 50% ($147K) of the total fees. The total fees payable were $293K for 11,547 requests.

2.2 Total Fees Paid

The information on the fees paid/deposited is displayed in Table 3. The total fees payable does not equal the total fees paid for several reasons, including fees waived ($93K), fees adjusted ($21K) and fees abandoned ($48K). The waiver of fees had a significant impact on the fees paid. For requests that incurred fees above the application fee, some or all of the non-application fees were waived in 85% of these cases.

2.3 Other Variables of Interest

The distribution and averages for the total number of pages reviewed, released and photocopied are provided in Tables 4 to 6, and the percentage of pages released relative to pages reviewed is provided in Table 7. On average, 102 pages are reviewed and 71 pages released, and in 83% of cases more than 90% of pages reviewed are released. For the over 11,500 requests, a total of 1.2 million pages were reviewed and approximately 70%, or 825,616, were released. It is curious that the mean number of pages photocopied was only 61, which is lower than the 71 released. Reviewing documents on site should not explain this since only 7 requests are recorded as involving on site viewing. This is another example of poor data quality.

Neither the fees payable nor the fees paid correlate strongly to the number of pages reviewed or the number of pages released, as shown in Table 8. This seems to indicate that there is little relationship between the size of a request and whether or not fees are waived.

*Significant at p<.05
**Significant at p<.01
***Significant at p<.001

The average search time was less than one hour (see Table 9). The total number of hours of search was nearly 7,892, but less than two percent of the requests had any search time associated with them. There are two implications of this. First, there were a small number of requests with a large amount of search time. The mere 13 cases that had more than 100 hours of search time actually totaled 4,069 search time hours, or 52% of the total search time for all requests. One request had over 1,200 hours of search time. The second implication is that not all search time is recorded. This would seem to be the case, since it is not plausible that 98% of the requests required no search time.

The status of the requests is presented in Table 10. These data show that 82% of the requests resulted in all the information being released (47%) or part of the information being released (35%). The incidence of no information being released due to exemptions was relatively low, (2%), although this could vary substantially depending on what departments are included in the data. The third most frequent outcome was that no information was found (8%). Requests were abandoned for 3.4% of the requests.

The source of requests is presented in Table 11. These requests are dominated by two sources, business (54%) and the general public (32%). The media accounted for 8% of requests and organizations for 7%. Requests from academics were relatively rare at well below 1%.

2.4 Relationship Between Fees Payable and Other Variables

Before beginning this section an overview of the fee types will be provided (see Table 12 below). Excluding application fees, the total non-application fees are determined almost entirely by photocopying (60%), and searching (33%). To a lesser extent preparation time is also important (7%) but all other fee types are either minimal or non-existent.

The pages reviewed, released and photocopied all show a quasi-linear increase in average fees charged as the quantity categories increase. The number of pages photocopied shows the largest jump in average total fees for the last category with a mean of approximately $1,300 compared to $570 to $600 for pages reviewed and released respectively. The cause for sudden shifts in the average fees can be accounted for by the large total fees associated with some requests. As discussed earlier, a small fraction of the requests accounted for an inordinately large percentage of the pages and fees.
In 16.2% of the requests sampled there were no pages reviewed (and therefore no pages released or photocopied). This could be another indication of poor data, or an indication that no records relating to the request existed. Even if no records existed, fees would still be payable if more than five hours were spent searching for the records. (However, fees may often be waived if, even after efforts to clarify the request, no records are found.)

The fees payagle by request status are provided in Table 16. Requests where nothing was disclosed or no information was found had virtually no fees payable other than the application fee. The other categories had fees payable that ranged from $13 to $25 on average, with two exceptions. At the higher end of the fees, requests that were disclosed in part had an average fee of $35 and abandoned requests had an average of $164.

Total fees payable by the source of the request is shown in Table 17. The highest average fees were incurred by the least common source of requests; academics and media both had mean fees close to $60. Media, which accounted for less than 8% of the requests accounted for 18% of the fees payable. Organizations were the third highest with average fees of $40 dollars. The most frequent sources of requests, businesses and the general public, had average fees of approximately $21. Despite the lower average fees, business still represented 44% of the total fees payable and the general public 27%.

More than 90% of requesters in each category pay only the application fee. For the public this proportion rises to over 98%.

Next Page

Return to Table of Contents