FOIA Backlog Reduction Goal and Plan
For the Federal Reserve Board
Goal: To reduce the Board's pending backlog of outstanding Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by at least 10 percent each year.
Plan: For FY 2009, the Board reported a backlog of 129 FOIA requests. Accordingly, the Board intends to reduce this backlog by at least 13 requests in FY 2010 and to reduce remaining backlogs by at least 10 percent annually in subsequent fiscal years. The following steps have been implemented to ensure that these reductions can be achieved:
- Senior FOIA staff in the Board's Legal Division and Office of the Secretary will review quarterly all pending FOIA requests that have exceeded the statutory response deadline. The review will (1) evaluate the scope of the request and identify the reasons for the delay and (2) devise a strategy for responding to each request more promptly whenever possible.
- The Legal Division and Office of the Secretary will continue to devote additional FOIA staff resources in order to minimize and reduce the number of backlogged requests at the end of each fiscal year, as described in the Chief FOIA Officer Report (available on the Board's FOIA webpage). Pending untimely responses will also be reallocated between those staffs throughout the fiscal year as required to speed up the response process.