Probably the most fundamental rule of filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request is specificity. The more clear your language and the more narrow your request, the more likely you are to receive records that are actually responsive in as timely a fashion as possible.

But the reality of FOIA is that’s not always possible. Part of the point of FOIA is obtaining information that, while public, isn’t public-facing. And that means there can be unknown unknowns.

For example, on the back of an Office of Fiscal Analysis report on overtime use by state agencies, I’ve been trying to find out more information about how those agencies track overtime. And I’ve filed three rounds of FOIA requests trying to obtain that information.

My initial starting point was the agencies themselves. If you search for information about overtime on the state government website, which is a good starting point to try to find background information before you file a FOIA request, you won’t find a lot of clarifying information. While Open Payroll contains information about how much overtime individual employees have received and the Department of Labor’s website contains a synopsis of what the law mandates for overtime pay for private employees, there is no public-facing information about state employee overtime policy or use on the state’s website.

For union employees, collective bargaining agreements set some rules for how overtime can be used, but that’s different than the actual policies implemented by agencies and obviously contains none of the granular data about how often overtime is used, by whom, and at what cost.

And that’s where FOIA can become a guessing game and, as a requester, you’re forced to rely on your best guess. The best place to go for state agency data, one might quite logically assume, is that state agency. But, according to the response I recently received from the University of Connecticut Health Center and the Department of Corrections, that assumption is incorrect.

Both agencies told me they don’t have any data on how overtime is used by their own employees and that data is found in Core CT, the system the state uses to manage payroll, human resources, and other administrative functions. And that requires a second FOIA request to the comptroller’s office, which manages Core CT.

Additionally, I filed FOIA requests with several state agencies for their overtime policies, again thinking that the best place to find state agency policies would be the state agencies themselves. But this, too, ended up being more complicated. While the secretary of the state’s office provided language from their employee handbook, which did nothing more than essentially summarize what the effective CBA says about overtime policies for union employees, others told me they didn’t have that information.

The Connecticut State Department of Education told me that, as overtime policies are governed by CBAs for union employees, they didn’t have any responsive information, and policies for both union and non-union employees would be maintained by the Department of Administrative Services. And that required yet another FOIA request.

Another Inside Investigator reporter has also been trying to obtain information about workers’ compensation claims and has been told by the seemingly obvious agency that would have data that they needed to look elsewhere.

When this happens, it can feel like you’re playing FOIA whack-a-mole. Filing FOIA requests requires due diligence and an investment of time. It’s easy to become discouraged when you put your best efforts into trying to obtain public information and, based on administrative details you couldn’t have known, you come up empty handed.

Further aggravating these types of situations is a recent change to state law that stipulates that, even if public agencies have information responsive to a FOIA request, they do not have to turn that information over if they are not the agency from which it originates.

A proposed stand alone bill that was reviewed during the 2024 legislative session also included language requiring state agencies to forward requests for records to their originating agencies and to notify requesters that this had been done. But the language absolving agencies of responding to requests for records that originated elsewhere was controversially placed in a budget implementer bill, and the language requiring agencies to forward requests was stripped. Despite bipartisan criticism of the move, the bill became law.

But as frustrating as the additional labor of filing more FOIA requests can be, it’s important to remember that it’s okay to make FOIA missteps. There is nothing wrong with filing a request for information in the wrong place. The public employee who is handling your request is an expert in their agency’s records; you (likely) are not.

There’s an information deficit inherent to FOIA and while the ultimate goal is to obtain records, overcoming that deficit and learning more in-depth information about the inner workings of public agencies is also valuable.

You may also run into a situation where, due to the lack of publicly available information, you’re told by a public agency that your request is too broad or they can’t determine what you’re looking for from the language of your request. There’s no shame in this either.

Language often gets weaponized in public records requests. When I worked in Maine and certain agencies were hostile to public records requests, parsing words to make sure you were using the broadest language possible was crucial to successfully obtaining records. Asking for “all records,” “any records” or using the word “and” rather than “or” in a list of keywords could mean the difference between a full response to a request and an extremely narrow interpretation of a request that provided as few records as possible.

In Connecticut, using this same language often results in public information officers (this is not an official term in Connecticut, but one I use to refer generally to the employees assigned by agencies to handle FOIA requests) stating a request is too broad and that they don’t know what you’re looking for. If a public agency does not want to comply with your request, they often find a way to weaponize the words you’ve used.

That’s why specificity is important. If you know the specific category or name of a record you’re looking for, you should use it. But if you don’t, it’s okay if your language is too broad. Again, public agencies don’t list every category or record they produce and it’s okay if you’re not exactly sure what you’re looking for.

This is where public information officers play a crucial role in the FOIA process. A good public information officer has information about the inner workings of their agencies and will ask follow-up questions and work with you to tweak the terms of your request so that you receive what you’re looking for in a timely fashion.

That does sometimes mean making compromises.

For example, there is technically no statutory limit to the size of a request you can make of a state agency. They cannot deny requests based on size. However, there are very real technical limitations to how many agencies collect information and process requests that effectively limit requests if you’d like to receive information within a reasonable time frame.

In the event you file a complaint against an agency for not responding promptly to a request, the FOIC also takes the breadth and complexity of requests and things like agency staffing into account when it’s evaluating those claims.

This often means there’s a tradeoff between whether you want to be technically correct about agencies having to comply with large requests (which are still valid) or whether you want usable information within a reasonable time frame.

The more FOIA requests you file and the more experience you have working or negotiating with public agencies, the better your instincts will be. But, in any case, it’s important to remember that oftentimes the FOIA process puts you in a disadvantage. Even though you need FOIA to learn information government has decided not to make public-facing, it’s a process that requires a certain knowledge of how government operates.

That’s often an untenable and frustrating position. But it’s okay to make missteps. Even if you’re not successful in obtaining public records, FOIA requests can still be productive if they result in learning previously unknown information about how government officials operate behind the scenes.

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