I recently read in Who Needs to Know that the General Accountability Office doesn’t put all of their reports online, as I’ve probably mistakenly implied before.
It seems that there’s a designation for GAO reports for “not online”, or “no internet”, whereby the GAO makes the reports available only by specific request, but bypassing their normal posting process which makes the reports available through this feed. This is apparently done occasionally at the request of worried agency heads.
I’m usually effusive with my praise of GAO, suggesting that their publication of reports, much like CBO’s similar practices, serves as a useful counterargument to the official concerns over publishing reports.
Since GAO suggests that they follow the spirit of the FOIA (which they aren’t required to, as an arm of the FOIA-exempt Congress), then the documents are either publicly available or not.
My suggestion is that some FOIA-empowered individual FOIA for the names and document numbers of all GAO documents withheld from Internet publication. This would produce a list of those documents that concerned the agencies GAO was reporting on, which would yield, in effect, the juiciest of all GAO documents, or perhaps those that agencies were most concerned about.
Bonus points go to anyone FOIA-ing for the agency’s concern letters sent to GAO (probably yielding the juiciest of the available documents). I wonder if the SEC is in there?
PS: To anyone at GAO reading this: I love GAO, and think your budget should be doubled. Also, please audit government-wide financial disclosures as required by law.
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The Open Senate Project // Dec 3, 2008 at 4:43 pm
[...] their triage arrangement for requests.) They’re also all public, although some of them are withheld from web publication by agency [...]
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