WELLINGTON
The Customhouse, 1 Hinemoa Street, Wellington
PO Box 2218, Wellington 6140
Phone: 04 901 4500 All general enquiries phone: 0800 428 786
Email: [email address] Website: www.customs.govt.nz
10 June 2022
Ref: OIA 22-073
Mr Andrew Ecclestone
Deputy Chair
New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties
By email:
[FYI request #19256 email]
Dear Mr Ecclestone
Request for information under the Official Information Act
Thank you for your email, dated 2 May 2022, to the New Zealand Customs Service
(Customs) via the FYI website, in which you requested the following information under the
Official Information Act 1982 (the Act):
“1. All list of all email communications to and from any Statistics New Zealand
employee, secondee or contractor and any Customs Service employee,
secondee or contractor for the period 1 May 2018 – 30 April 2022. This list
should include the sent or received date, the email account it was sent from or
received by, the subject line and the filenames of any documents attached to the
email. Under section 16 of the OIA, our preferred means of receiving this
information is in tabular form in a spreadsheet or CSV format.
2. The contents of all emails identified by Customs New Zealand in the list
generated when responding to item 1 above that relate to the following topics:
a. Data sharing
b. Data ethics
c. Data security
d. Transparency
e. Data governance
f.
Data management
g. The writing or circulation of advice, a paper, memo or guidance on ‘security
vs transparency’
3. Copies of the attachments to any of the emails meeting the criteria identified in
items 1 and 2 above.”
Thank you also for your further email dated 13 May 2022, in response to Customs’ request
for clarification email dated 10 May 2022. As noted in Customs’ clarification email, your
request is of a very broad nature, and Customs requested that you refine the scope of your
request to allow Customs to provide you with a response in a timely way. In your response
you referred Customs to your response to Stats NZ’s clarification email, and noted Customs’
duties under sections 18A and 18B of the Act.
As the request was unable to be refined, it has remained of a very broad nature. It would
require a significant amount of manual effort to identify, retrieve and collate the information
requested. Therefore, your request is refused under section 18(f) of the Act, as the
information requested cannot be made available without substantial collation or research.
In deciding to refuse your request under
section 18(f) of the Act, Customs has considered, in
accordance with section 18A(1) of the Act, whether fixing a charge under section 15 of the
Act, or extending the time limit for response under section 15A of the Act would enable the
request to be granted. However this would still have an adverse impact on the operation of
Customs, as a result of having to divert staff from other responsibilities.
In addition, Customs has consulted with you to enable you to make the request in a way that
would not require substantial collation or research, as referenced above, in accordance with
section 18B of the Act.
If you are not satisfied with my response, you have the right, by way of complaint to the
Office of the Ombudsman under section 28(3) of the Act, to seek an investigation and review
of this decision. Information about how to make a complaint is available online at:
www.ombudsman.parliament.nz or you can phone 0800 802 602.
However, in the first instance if you have any queries about this response, please contact
the Correspondence, Reviews and Ministerial Servicing team at
: [email address].
Please note that Customs proactively releases responses to Official Information Act requests
on our website. As such, we may publish this response on our website after we have sent it
to you. Your name and contact details will be removed.
Yours sincerely
Debbie Kay
Manager, Correspondence Reviews and Ministerial Servicing
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