Dear Australian Taxation Office,

The ATO's submissions to the House Tax and Revenue Committee's inquiry into external scrutiny of the ATO contain various details and statistics about recommendations made by external scrutineers such as the Inspector-General of Taxation. The ATO appears to record information which is not publicly available, such as the time taken to implement each recommendation.

Please provide the ATO's register of external scrutineer recommendations, including the length of time taken to implement each recommendation.

Yours faithfully,

Patrick Conheady

Dear Nicole,

I do apologise for the delay in responding. However, I cannot in good conscience grant an extension. I did consider the slight potential unfairness of my late reply (the deadline is three days away) but the lack of justification for your request does outweigh that.

You indicated in your email that, as of 20 May, nearly three weeks after you received the request, you were 'in the process of searching for the material that will satisfy your request'. That is, you had not found the document and you had not even begun the decision-making process.

This was a request for a very specific document. The recent references to the documents by the agency in public House of Representatives proceedings (referred to in my request) mean that you could find the document in no time at all with a phone call to the agency's 'parliamentary services' (or equivalent) team. Every agency has a parliamentary services team and they are all very efficient.

Without my agreement, the only other way to get an extension is from the OAIC for a 'complex or voluminous' request. This request does not fall into that category.

It is not clear to me why this request should take more than the ordinary statutory timeframe. It is not an unusual request. In fact it is probably one of the simpler cases contemplated by the Act.

I think that requests for an extension should be accompanied by a statement of what the agency is doing and what steps remain in the process, and how long they are expected to take, and why the request should fall outside the ordinary statutory timeframe. Otherwise the impression is given that the agency has simply not devoted sufficient resources to fulfilling its functions under the FOI Act.

Accordingly, your request for an extension is denied.

Yours sincerely,

Patrick Conheady

Dear Mary,

Thanks for your email.

The released document appears to be a PDF file created from a spreadsheet such as an Excel file.

The original machine-readable table would be substantially more useful than a PDF image of the table.

Is it at all possible for you to provide the table in its original machine-readable form?

Yours sincerely,

Patrick Conheady