Fiscal Year 2015 FOIA Data Now Available

OIP is pleased to announce that all 100 agencies subject to the FOIA have finalized their Fiscal Year (FY) 2015 Annual FOIA Reports and that the Department has uploaded all of the data from these reports onto FOIA.gov. 

Each year, federal departments and agencies are required by law to submit a report to the Attorney General detailing various statistics regarding their agency’s FOIA activities, such as the numbers of requests processed and received, and the time taken to process them. The data from all of these Annual FOIA Reports is then uploaded onto FOIA.gov, the Justice Department’s government-wide FOIA resource, so that the public can easily view it and compare FOIA data by agency and over time.

OIP is currently in the process of compiling its Summary of Agency Annual FOIA Reports for FY 2015. However, from the data uploaded onto FOIA.gov we can already see that the government overall has achieved significant accomplishments this past year. For example:

• The government overall reported processing a record high 769,903 FOIA requests, which is an increase of 19% from FY 2014, and the first time agencies have reported processing numbers over 700,000 requests.
   
• As a result of these record high processing numbers, the government also reduced its backlog of pending FOIA requests by just over 35%.  
   
• Seventy-one agencies reported having a backlog of fewer than 100 requests, and 29 report have no backlog at all.
   
• This also marks the seventh year in a row where agencies released information in full or in part for more than 91% of the requests processed for a disclosure determination.   

We encourage everyone to visit FOIA.gov to view each agency's data as well as government-wide FOIA statistics.

The Department looks forward to seeing all of the registered attendees at our Sunshine Week Kickoff Celebration on Monday, March 14^th and at our FOIA IT Working Group meeting on Thursday, March 17^th. Please continue reading FOIA Post for additional Sunshine Week 2016 announcements as well as for the release of the Department’s Summary of Agency Annual FOIA Reports in the coming weeks.