Palace OKs only 4 of 140 FOI requests

MANILA, Philippines – More than a week after it was launched, the government’s freedom of information (FOI) website has so far rejected 12 requests for data, three times the number of requests approved.

“There’s still a lot of learning curve here in the FOI executive order since not all agencies are enrolled (to the website) and others are still undergoing training,” Presidential Communications Operations (PCO) Secretary Martin Andanar told radio station dzRB yesterday.

The FOI portal foi.gov.ph has received about 140 requests for data as of yesterday. Of the 15 state agencies enrolled at the website, only the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) and the PCO have granted requests so far.

Both the DBM and PCO have approved two requests each. A total of 12 requests have been rejected, a majority or eight of them addressed to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).  

PCO has rejected three requests while the justice department has rejected one.

The DBM and the Department of Transportation got the most number of requests with 23 each. They were followed by the Department of Health with 17, Department of Information and Communications Technology with 15, the Philippine National Police and the PSA with 13 each and the PCO with 11.

The National Archives of the Philippines received nine requests while the finance department and the Presidential Commission on Good Government got four each. The justice department got three requests while its attached agency Public Attorney’s Office received two. The Office of the Government Corporate Counsel, the Office of the Solicitor-General and Philippine Health Insurance Corp. each got one request.

“So far it’s been good. But then again when we launched this, we did not say that it’s going to be 100 percent (ready),” Andanar said. 

“We will be going around the country to train the different regional offices how to implement the Freedom of Information Executive Order and how to use also the electronic FOI,” he added.

The EO on FOI, which requires all offices under the executive branch to disclose details of their transactions and projects, was signed by President Duterte last July 23.