
	Chris Mulick has worked for the Herald since 1998 and has served as the statehouse correspondent covering state government and politics since 2000. He works year-round out of the Herald's Olympia bureau on the state Capitol campus. Have a question? Send Chris an e-mail and he'll answer the best questions regularly.

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Monday, May. 19, 2008

Auditor finds government compliance with records requests

State Auditor Brian Sonntag released a performance audit today dealing with state and local government agencies’ handling of public records requests. 30 state agencies, counties and cities were tested based on their handling of 10 separate and anonymous requests.

“Our audit work revealed that, by and large, most of the 30 entities we audited are providing good customer service in responding to public records requests,” the final audit report states.

You can find it here.

In the end, 31 of 300 requests were deemed to be non-responsive and seven more were deemed “non-conforming or incomplete.”

That means that 88 percent of the requests were fulfilled satisfactorily.

The report includes agency responses and some were defensive, even if they scored well. There were many complaints about the methodologies used to determined whether certain requests were fulfilled properly.

The City of Seattle, for instance, got dinged for fulfilling two of 10 requests sufficiently. It was faulted for asking requesters to re-submit their request with another entity within city government.

The city argues that its departments shouldn’t have to accept requests for information held by other departments. Other governments did, too.

Yakima County was sited for five cases of noncompliance. In four of those five a response was drafted but was not received by the requester.

“Unfortunately, a thorough review of the mail handling procedures of the Washington State Auditor’s Office and Yakima County were not part of this performance review,” Yakima County Commissioner Ronald Gamache wrote in response.

UPDATE: Greg Overstreet posted on the report over at his Open Government blog today and offers this endorsement.

"Holy smokes. You should read this," he writes.

TUESDAY UPDATE: You can find the story on this subject that ran in today’s paper here.

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