Dear Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade,

Please provide an Itemised account for sending 20+ employees to France so as to learn how to save money, and to include but not limited to airfare costs, accommodation costs, food costs, beverage costs, seminar / course costs and any other costs billed to the Australian Taxpayer.

Yours faithfully,

Vito Guzzardi

Dear FOI,

Please see the following newspaper website link that explains my FOI request further - post your most recent reply that nothing existed in response to my original request.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/p...

Thanks

Yours sincerely,

Vito Guzzardi

Dear Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's handling of my FOI request 'Itemised account for sending 20+ employees to France so as to learn how to save money.'.

I have looked at the website that the applicant mentions in his final email. I have also read the decision letter from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

According to the web-page of the Sydney Morning Herald (http://bit.ly/2domrhX ), the conference was from 7 Septermber 2016 to 9 September 2016. Therefore, on 20 October 2016 (this is the day of the request by the applicant), the expenses for the trip would be inside the knowledge of the department. So what is happening here? What does the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade mean when the decision maker says that the document does not exist? In my opinion there exist two possibilities. It is the most probable that the department is trying to play a game of "black letter law". Mr Guzzardi has asked for an itemised account and maybe on 20 October 2016 such an itemised account did not exist. This would explain the sentence in the decision letter that says "An applicant cannot insist that their request cover documents created after the request is received." Maybe an itemised account now exists but it was created after 20 October 2016!

There is also another possibility but I do not want to embarrass the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The possibility is that the officer does not understand the law! I say this because we can assume that (as I have already said) the information, but maybe not a document, about the costs of the trips was already possessed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade by 20 October 2016. In general, the Freedom of Information Act of the Commonwealth of Australia gives an applicant a right to access documents but does not require a department to create documents or provide general information to answer questions. However, there is an important exception to this and I now quote section 17 of the Act. It is rather long but informative. I hope my readers will follow:

17 Requests involving use of computers etc.
(1) Where: (a) a request ... is made in accordance with the requirements of subsection 15(2) to an agency; (b) it appears from the request that the desire of the applicant is for information that is not available in discrete form in written documents of the agency; and (ba) it does not appear from the request that the applicant wishes to be provided with a computer tape or computer disk on which the information is recorded; and
(c) the agency could produce a written document containing the information in discrete form by: (i) the use of a computer or other equipment that is ordinarily available to the agency for retrieving or collating stored information ... the agency shall deal with the request as if it were a request for access to a written document so produced and containing that information and, for that purpose, this Act applies as if the agency had such a document in its possession.

So, let us summarise. The information that the applicant wants might not exists "in discrete form in written documents of the agency", but the information will exist in the computers of the agency because each employee will have a file for travel expenses and they will be recorded in a computer! Therefore, section 17 applies to the applicants request and the agency should produce the document that the applicant wants and deal with the request as if the agency [already] had the document.

What is the applicant to do? He has several choices, including a choice to do nothing at all. Also he could lodge a new application, or he could ask for an internal review. I think that the only benefit of a new application would be in the unlikely fact that the department did not actually have the cost information by 20 October. I believe this is not likely, so I think a request for internal review is better. Here is the internal review letter. It must be sent before 21 December 2016.

Dear Ms Horsington,

Please pass this email on to the person who conducts internal reviews.

On 21 November 2016 I received a decision notice (http://bit.ly/2hYXPdg ) from your decision maker. The decision notice refused access to the document I requested in my email (http://bit.ly/2gLgXKO ) of 20 October 2016. For the reasons that follow, I believe that the decision maker has made a mistake.

(A) In the Sydney Morning Herald (http://bit.ly/2domrhX ) from 19 October there is a story that describes a "two day junket in September" for executives of the DFAT that was from 7 September 2016 to 9 September 2016.
(B) On 20 October 2016 I requested "an Itemised account for sending 20+ employees to France so as to learn how to save money, and to include but not limited to airfare costs, accommodation costs, food costs, beverage costs, seminar / course costs and any other costs billed to the Australian Taxpayer."
(C) I think that by 20 October 2016 the DFAT would have the information about the cost of the trip for each executive and that the information would have been stored on a departmental computer. The information is probably in a travel file for each executive or in summaries of credit card statements for the executives.
(D) Section 17 of the FOI Act required your decision maker, Ms Horsington, to treat my request for an itemised account as a request for a document that actually existed even if a discrete document did not exist on 20 October 2016.

Please review the decision made by Ms Horsington and grant me access to the itemised account.

Thanks
Vito Guzzardi.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.righttoknow.org.au/request/i...

Yours faithfully,

Vito Guzzardi