I have lodged the following complaint with the Ombudsman:

"Tēnā koe,

I would like to lodge a formal complaint regarding a failure to provide information in the way preferred, without providing a reason why this was not done.

ACC received a request for official information from me on 2018-04-17, regarding OIA response time statistics. In my request, I had specified a preferred format for any tabular data that would be included in their response:

“Please provide all information in an accessible, searchable format. A spreadsheet format, such as CSV or XLSX, is preferable for tabular data.”

On 2018-05-16, ACC responded to my request by sending a response letter and a PDF of a table. There was no note in the response letter of the fact that a format different to the one I had asked for was used for this tabular data, or a reason why the preferred format was not used.

Ten minutes after receiving the response, I sent the following reply to ACC:

“Tēnā koe,

Thank you for your response. I would like to reiterate the following part of my request:

"Please provide all information in an accessible, searchable format. A spreadsheet format, such as CSV or XLSX, is preferable for tabular data."

Please re-send the response an accessible format as specified, unless there is a good reason under section 16(2) of the OIA as to why this cannot be done.

Ngā mihi,
Mark Hanna”

Three working days have passed since I sent that response, and I have still not had any further response from ACC.

A PDF of this data is not useful to me, and in order for it to become useful I would have to transcribe all the data (the table contains about 2,500 cells) into a spreadsheet so that I can analyse it programmatically. Thankfully, I am also waiting on responses to similar requests made to other agencies before I need to analyse it all, so I would prefer to wait for a response from ACC than spend the time to transcribe all this information manually myself.

I expect that a spreadsheet was prepared by ACC before being exported to a PDF, and so providing this information as a spreadsheet would be easy for ACC to do.

It is my understanding that section 16(2) of the OIA requires an agency to provide data in the format preferred by the requester, unless there is a specific allowed reason for not doing this, and that if information is not provided in the preferred format section 16(3) requires an agency to tell the requester why this was not done. I believe ACC has fallen short of both of these responsibilities in their response to my request.

Here is a brief timeline of all correspondence regarding this request to date:

2018-04-17 - ACC received my request
2018-04-24 - I received an acknowledgement of receipt of my request from ACC
2018-05-16 - I received a response to my request from ACC
2018-05-16 - I replied to ACC’s response to ask them to provide the information in the specified format.

There has been no further correspondence to date.

I have attached a zip file containing all correspondence I have had with ACC regarding this request. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if any part of my complaint is unclear, or if you require any more information from me.

Ngā mihi,
Mark Hanna"

You may want to know that the Appendix document (the one with the information) was generated using a program called Acrobat PDFMaker 11 for Word. This means that the information would have been available in a Word document inside of a table so there is absolutely no reason they can't provide it to you in a Word, Excel or even CSV format.

They also didn't put the agency respondents name in their letter. The individual in this case is Terence Routledge should you wish to follow up with them directly. This information can be obtained from the metadata of the PDF.

Your request for a preferred 'format', per Section 16, isn't quite accurate in terms of what is being referred to in that section.

Section 16 discusses documents within which official information may be contained, and how access to that information may be provided in the circumstances.

In this regard, a preference could be stated that a requester would like to view the original document, or receive a copy of it.

Section 16, as it is written, is not a mechanism through which a requester can require information compiled to satisfy a request to be provided in a certain electronic format. Usually, agencies are more than happy to discuss with requesters a file format that is both suitable to the requester's needs and which will not put the information into a jeopardised condition (I.e. Subsequently reordered or otherwise reworked so as to mislead what was orininally produced in reply).

The purpose of providing information, in the first place, is to inform the requester. If a certain electronic format will assist in achieving that, all well and good. However, a requirement does not exist within the OIA for a requester to have a certain format provided in answer to their request which is not originally in document form.