Working my way through things that turned up while I was away, I stumbled on an impressive piece of public sector diligence.  At 3.44pm on the last working before Christmas – a time by which surely most office-bound workers had already left work for the holidays –  Angus Barclay, from the Communications Department of the Reserve Bank, responded to an Official Information Act request I’d lodged with the Bank’s Board several weeks earlier.   I was impressed that Angus had still been at work, but was less impressed with the substance of the response.

I’d asked the Board for copies of the minutes of meetings of the full Board and any Board committees in the second half of last year (specifically 1 July to 30 November).  It didn’t seem likely to be an onerous request: there would probably only have been four or five full Board meetings, and perhaps some committee minutes, all of which will have been readily accessible (in other words virtually no time all in search or compilation).    Perhaps the Board would have wanted to withhold some material, and (subject to the statutory grounds) that would have been fine.  But again, doing so shouldn’t have been onerous.   The Board, after all, exists mostly to monitor the performance of the Governor, on behalf of the public.   In an open society, it isn’t naturally the sort of material one should expect to be kept secret.

In fact, in the 22 December response I received I was informed that there were only five documents.  But I couldn’t have them.  Instead, the request was extended for almost another two months, with a new deadline of 19 February.   Oh, and they foreshadowed that they would probably want to charge me for whatever they might eventually choose to release.

Why was I asking?     After an earlier request to the Board, around the appointment of an “acting Governor”, it had come to light that there was no documentation at all around the process for the appointment of a new Governor (that had been underway in 2016, before Steven Joyce told them to stop), which in turn appeared to be a clear violation of the Public Records Act.    The process of selecting a candidate to be the new Governor is one of the Board’s single most important powers.   And yet the records showed that nothing had been documented –  to be clear (see earlier post), it wasn’t that material was withheld (for which there might well have been an arguable case), it just didn’t exist.   Following that post in May, I was interested to see whether the Board had sharpened up its act, and come into compliance with its statutory obligations.

I had some other interests, of course.   For example, in the five months covered by my request, Graeme Wheeler had finished his term, and I also wondered if there might be some insight in the minutes on the still-secret Rennie review on the governance of the Reserve Bank.

But instead I met obstruction.

There are two things that interest me about the response.  The first is that, although the request was explicitly made of the Reserve Bank Board –  which has a separate statutory existence, and whose prime function is to hold the Bank/Governor to account –  the response came from Reserve Bank staff, referencing only Reserve Bank policies and practices.  It is consistent with my longstanding claim that the Board has allowed itself to simply serve the interests of, and identify with, the Bank –  rather than, say, the Minister who appointed them, or they public whom they (ultimately) serve.

Thus, in respect of the charging threat, I received this line

The Ombudsman states on page 4 of the guidelines on charging that: “It may also be relevant to consider the requester’s recent conduct. If the requester has previously made a large volume of time-consuming requests to an agency, it may be reasonable to start charging in order to recover some of the costs associated with meeting further requests.”

I’m not precisely sure how many OIA requests I lodged with the Board last year, but I’m pretty sure it was no more than four (and one of those was to secure material that was in fact covered by, but ignored in the answer to, an earlier request).   Three of the four I can recall were simply requests for copies of minutes – with no substantial search or collation costs.  Given the uncertainty around the legality of the appointment of the “acting Governor”, major events during the year such as the Rennie review, questions around compliance with the Public Records Act, and the process of selecting a new Governor, it didn’t seem like an undue burden on the Board.

As the Ombudsman’s charging guidelines also note

Note, however, that some requesters (for example, MPs and members of the news media), may have good reasons for making frequent requests for official information, and they should not be penalised for doing so.

Since this blog is one of the main vehicles through which a powerful public agency –  Bank and/or Board –  is challenged and scrutinised, I’d say I was on pretty strong ground in my request for straightforward Board minutes.  (And just to check that the Board itself isn’t being overwhelmed with other requests, I lodged a simple further request this morning asking how many OIA requests the Board has received in each of the last two years, and copies of the Board’s procedures of handling OIA requests made of it.)

I can only assume that the Bank itself, which seems to be controllling the handling of requests made even to the Board, has gotten rather annoyed with me again, and decided to use the threat of charging as some sort of penalty or deterrent.  Longstanding readers may recall that we have been this way once before.  About two years ago, the Bank got very annoyed with me (and some other requesters) and started talking of charging left, right and centre.   Reaction wasn’t very favourable, and Deputy Governor Geoff Bascand even took to the newspapers with an op-ed defending the Bank’s stance.   There was talk of a “mushrooming” number of requests, but on closer examination even that didn’t really stack up –  the number of OIA requests the Bank received was much smaller than, say, those The Treasury received.     Explaining is (often) losing, and as I noted at the time, the Bank didn’t come out of the episode well.   As a refresher, the Bank released responses to 20 OIA requests in 2017.  The Treasury, by contrast, released responses to more than 80 OIA requests (in both agencies there will be have responses not posted on the respective websites).

But even in their defence a couple of years ago, Bascand asserted that the Bank –  no mention of the Board –  would be charging only when the requests were “large, complex or frequent”.  My latest request of the Board is neither large nor complex, and neither were the earlier requests.

Even though the Bank and the Board are not the same entities, they are clearly trying to conflate my requests to both entities.   But over the course of last year, my records suggest I lodged no requests at all with the Reserve Bank itself in the first five months of last year.    Between June and the end of the year, there seem to have been quite a few, but on topics as diverse as:

• the new “PTA” signed by Steven Joyce and Grant Spencer,
• the Toplis suppression affair,
• assumptions about new government policies the Bank referred to in its latest MPS,
• some data from an expectations survey that the Bank had not published
• three old papers, each clearly-identified in the request,
• a specific paper on RB governance issues explicitly mentioned in the Bank’s BIM, and
• work on digital currencies that the Bank explicitly highlighted in a recent research paper.

All still seem like reasonable requests, of a powerful agency which has a wide range of functions.  It seems unlikely that many of them should have involved any material amount of time to search for, or collate (in fact, in response to several requests the Bank responded quite quickly and in full, prompting notes of thanks from me).   There are no requests that can reasonably be described as “fishing expeditions”, and no pattern of repeated requests for much the same information.  They seem like the sort of requests those who devised the Official Information Act might have had in mind.

Finally, it is worth noting what the Ombudsman’s guidelines suggest can and can’t be charged for (bearing in mind that very few agencies charge at all).    Agencies can, in appropriate circumstances, charge for things like

Search and retrieval 

Collation (bringing together the information at issue) 

Research (reading and reviewing to identify the information at issue) 

Editing (the physical task of excising or redacting withheld information) 

Scanning or copying

Five nicely-filed documents (Board minutes) will have taken mere minutes to retrieve, no time to copy (since they will exist in electronic form already) and no time to research.  It is conceivable that the physical task of redacting withheld information might take a little time –  but very little.

And what can’t agencies charge for at all?

Work required to decide whether to grant the request in whole or part, including:
– reading and reviewing to decide on withholding or release;

– seeking legal advice to decide on withholding or release;

– consultation to decide on withholding or release; and – peer review of the decision to withhold or release. 

Work required to decide whether to charge and if so, how much, including estimating the charge.

If the Reserve Bank or the Board think that trying to charge for five simple, easily accessible, documents is consistent with the principles of the Official Information Act, or of the sort of transparency they often like to boast of, things are even worse than I’d supposed.   And in the attempt, they will again damage their own image and reputation more than they inconvenience me.

If anything, it is further evidence of why a full overall of the Reserve Bank Act –  and of the institution –  is required.  You might have supposed that, with a review underway, the Bank and the Board would have wanted to go out of their way to attempt to demonstrate that there were no problems, no issues, in an attempt to convince the Minister to make only minimal changes, leaving incumbents with as much power and control over information as possible.  But no, instead by the words and actions they simply reinforce the case for reform, and indicate that they have little concept of what genuine public accountability means.   We should be looking for openness, not obtuseness and obstructiveness from the Bank –  whether the Governor (“acting” or permanent) or the Board, supposedly operating on our behalf to keep the Bank in check.  Once again, we don’t see what we should have the right to expect.

Perhaps, on reflection, the Bank or the Board will reconsider their wish to charge for some simple documents –  the sort of documents that should probably be pro-actively released as a matter of course.  If not, one can only assume they have something to hide.   The “good governance” former public servant in me is sufficiently disquieted about the evidence of weak or non-existent recordkeeping that I am thinking of taking further the apparent breach of the Public Records Act.  Options might include:

• a letter to the chair of the Board, asking how the Board is assured that it is operating in compliance with the Act,
• a letter to the Minister of Finance, asking whether (and how) he can be sure that his appointees (the Board) are operating in compliance, given past evidence of major gaps,
• a letter to the minister responsible for the Public Records Act itself,
• a letter to the Auditor-General expressing concerns about the evidence suggesting that the Board of the Reserve Bank is not meeting its statutory obligations under the Public Records Act.