If you’ve filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in Connecticut, you’ve probably run into the GovQA system, the online portal state agencies use to handle public records requests.

GovQA is part of a massive, multi-state contract for numerous government services with the National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO). The system adds to the headaches of navigating FOIA for a number of reasons, and chief among those are the structural hurdles it creates that complicate requests for information.

Case in point: I recently spent several hours creating roughly 100 individual requests for complaints submitted to the Department of Consumer Protection (DCP).

On the whole, this is actually a positive story of government officials working with me to get something I wanted as quickly as possible, but the sticking point is GovQA.

As part of some upcoming work related to occupational licensure, I submitted a FOIA request to DCP in September seeking closed consumer complaints from the previous year. A few months later, I spoke with DCP’s communications director, who clarified that I could either receive a complete report of every single complaint or a summary of each report, which could be followed up with a request for the complete report of every complaint in which I was interested. The latter would be processed faster and allow me to identify the most useful information. So far, so good.

After I received the summary—about 3,500 cases in total—I identified several hundred I was interested in seeing in more detail. Because my original request was technically closed, I reached out to DCP again to find out the best way to proceed.

The answer: because of the way GovQA processes requests, I should submit an individual request for each complaint case I was seeking. Apparently, GovQA can really only handle requests that deal with a single document.

But I was looking for several hundred of them. And even though they were fairly straightforward requests, seeking a case name by the number assigned to it by DCP, it still takes a few minutes to fill GovQA’s form out.

I was a few hours and roughly 100 requests in before DCP contacted me to find an alternative solution because, at that point, both our email inboxes were full of notices of the requests I had filed.

While DCP agreed the best solution was to simply submit one request for the remaining cases I was interested in, this didn’t ultimately solve the problem. It just shifted it off of me and onto them. DCP officials now had to figure out how to turn over the responsive documents without sending me several hundred emails each containing one complaint file.

Now, call me crazy, but I submit FOIA requests seeking multiple pieces of information all the time. And I know I’m far from the only one who does so. Since requests are processed in the order they’re received, it’s just faster to request multiple pieces of related information. I’ve also reviewed a lot of FOIA requests submitted by the public and they too rarely are only looking for one document or piece of information.

So why would the GovQA portal make it so difficult to process multifaceted requests, as seems to be standard operating procedure among requesters?

I’ve run into similar issues with other agencies, including the Department of Corrections (DOC). To run a search of email communications, they require a time frame, keyword, and employee name.

Now, for those of you submitting your own requests, it’s good practice to include those things. Specificity ensures you get accurate information a lot faster. But you don’t always know exactly what you’re looking for. Especially since state government agencies are not always forthcoming with letting you know who works in what role.

Sometimes, you may have a general idea of a topic but be in the dark as to the particulars of when it was discussed or by who. For example, you might hear a statement at a press conference and know there were internal discussions in the DOC commissioner’s office about the strategy for making remarks, but not know when that discussion occurred or who contributed.

That’s part of what makes FOIA—and keyword searches in particular—a good tool for transparency. Yes, you should be as specific as possible with requests. But when you don’t know what you don’t know, sometimes you need to go on a fishing expedition. Those types of requests tend to be larger and take a longer time to process, but that does not mean they are illegitimate.

Parameters like DOC’s, which require you to have a lot of specific information up front, result in one of two scenarios: you don’t get the information you’re looking for, or you get a better idea of what you need to search for and then have to wait on a more specific follow-up request.

Structural hurdles are, ultimately, not in the public interest and are a barrier to rooting out corruption. Whether it’s a reporter like me who files hundreds of these requests, or someone from the general public submitting for the first time, these barriers make obtaining public information even more difficult and make uncovering wrongdoing that much harder.

We’re working to root out corruption through investigative journalism, and transparency is key to that success. Have your own frustrations obtaining information through FOIA? Let me know by emailing katherine@insideinvestigator.org.  

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