The Department of Justice has published a proposed Privacy Act System of Records for records maintained by the Office of Information and Policy. Comments on the proposal are due by April 18, 2012.
These notices are usually routine. However, this one has an interesting item -- DOJ is saying that these Privacy Act system includes "records related to requests for the Office of Information Policy to serve as Ombudsman in disputes between federal agencies and individuals who submit requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)." The FOIA Ombudsman role, however is statutory delegated to another office, the Office of Government Information Services that is housed in a different agency, the National Archives and Records Administration. Thus, OIP should have no records as ombudsman as OIP is not the FOIA Ombudsman. It will be interesting to see how this addition to the Privacy Act System of Records is explained by the DOJ.
OIP has actually been running their own Ombuds outfit for the last year or so. They've handled a few items for me (I learned pretty quickly that DOJ components tend to listen to OIP more than OGIS). When I asked them about the overlap with OGIS, they explained that their take on the OPEN Government Act is that it does not give OGIS _exclusive_ responsibility for FOIA Ombuds services.
Posted by: Kel McClanahan | March 20, 2012 at 08:01 PM