One of the most common excuses for OIA failures is under-resourcing. Government agencies sometimes claim that don't have the staff or the time to properly obey the law. Which might have worked as an excuse briefly when the OIA was new, but its been the law now for 40 years, and you'd expect them to have sorted their shit out long ago. More importantly, ministers and chief executives have a legal duty of stewardship, and are required to ensure that their agencies can properly perform their statutory functions. If they do not have the resources to perform those functions, then it is the responsibility of its chief executive to ask for them, and of the minister to ensure they get what they need.
But do they actually do this? I asked 34 government agencies - the 32 public service agencies scheduled in the Public Service Act, plus NZDF and the police - whether they had proposed budget initiatives seeking additional resources for OIA handling, information and records management, or ministerials for any of budgets 2018 - 2021 (OIA handling being what I was after, ministerials because OIAs are often done by an agency's ministerial team, and information and records management because these are important supporting technologies which enable requests to be processed). I did not ask internal transfers because I did not think of it at the time, but some agencies were either helpful or realised it would make them look good and provided that information anyway. I did not ask about budget 2022 because that part of the request would have been refused.
I received the final response yesterday, 41 working days after the requests were lodged. A summary of the responses can be viewed here. Of the 34 agencies:
- 29 had not made any such budget bids and did not volunteer any other information (these are classed as "informative refusals" on the spreadsheet, and their specific comments are included as a note. The responses were largely template, and MBIE's is typical).
- Four agencies - the Department of Conservation, Ministry of Pacific Peoples, Ministry of Health, and the Police - had allocated additional resources from baseline funding or by a formal internal transfer, but had not asked for additional resources via the budget process. In DoC's case, they'd actually done it twice within the relevant time period, and provided a full business case for each as well as an interesting look at how various other agencies resource OIA handling. It is possible some other agencies also provided resources this way; if they didn't take the opportunity to tell me about it, that's on them.
- Only one agency raised a formal budget bid: Oranga Tamariki. And it was really about privacy requests, rather than the OIA.
So there you have it: fewer than one in eight agencies allocated additional resources to OIA handling, and only one raised a formal budget bid remotely connected to it (and that was really about privacy requests). The conclusion is that agency chief executives feel they are properly resourcing OIA handling - or perhaps that requests to ministers for additional resources would not be welcome. But regardless of the reason, the fact that they have not asked for more undercuts any claim to be "under-resourced". This myth is busted.
