OIA 18-E-1061
3 April 2019
T Benseman
By email: [FYI request #9268 email]
Tēnā koe
OFFICIAL INFORMATION ACT REQUEST
I refer to your official information request dated 16 December 2018 and our first
response to you dated 15 January 2019.
On behalf of the Director-General of the Department of Conservation, I provide our
final response in respect of the request you made on 16 December 2018. In doing
so, we address a series of clarifications and further requests you have made in
relation to that initial request.
Your initial request sought all of the Department’s bank statements for the seven
years from 1 January 2011 to 1 January 2018. You asked that these be provided to
you in “digital raw form”.
The Department wrote to you on 15 January 2019 noting that unless you were to
refine your request it would need to be declined under section 18(f) on the basis that
it would require substantial collation and research.
A sample of bank statements as well as a link to the Department’s annual reports
were sent to you at that time. You were asked to refine your request by having it
apply to a shorter period of time or indicate whether you were prepared to pay to
meet the cost of the work required to respond to your request. We asked that you
respond to us by no later than 1 February 2019.
On 20 January you responded via FYI asking that we provide CSV files from the
bank rather than our uploading scanned paper documents.
On 30 January you were advised of a delay at the Department’s end owing to a
bereavement.
Having not received that message, you posted a further note to FYI reiterating your
request for the Department’s bank statements between 2011 and 2018 as CSV files.
After carefully considering your request of 16 December as well as the related
correspondence mentioned above, we have decided to refuse your request under
section 18(f) of the Act on the basis that it would require substantial collation to
complete.
In doing so, we have also considered whether the requested information could be
made available if we were to charge you for the necessary work. Given the very
Department of Conservation - Te Papa Atawhai
Whare Kaupapa Atawhai / Conservation House
PO Box 10420, Wellington 6143,
www.doc.govt.nz
DOC-5890284
broad scope of your request, and in the absence of you having refined it, we consider
that even if we were to charge, responding to your request would place an
unreasonable administrative burden on the Department.
Central to that decision is that the collation of the documents you have requested
would require a careful line by line review to assess and attend to any privacy or
commercial considerations their release would present.
Please note that this is our final response in relation to this matter and we do not
propose to engage in any further correspondence with you in relation to this request.
This letter (with your personal details removed) may be published on the
Department’s website.
You are entitled to seek an investigation and review of my decision by writing to an
Ombudsman as provided by section 28 (3) Official Information Act.
Yours sincerely
Katrina Nowlan
Director, Finance
Department of Conservation - Te Papa Atawhai
Whare Kaupapa Atawhai / Conservation House
PO Box 10420, Wellington 6143,
www.doc.govt.nz
DOC-5890284
