FOIA officials confront pandemic challenges in meeting records requests

By Jory Heckman, Fed. News Network, Oct. 19, 2020

The rush to mandatory telework in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic laid bare the state of agencies’ investment — or lack thereof — in IT infrastructure.

That same lesson holds true for agency offices tasked with fulfilling Freedom of Information Act requests at a time when employees, in some cases, have limited access to records while teleworking, especially if a FOIA request queries sensitive or classified records.

In some cases, agencies have enabled remote access for some FOIA processing tools, but not enough that would allow this work to be completed by employees working from home.

Read more here.