FOIA established a legal right of access to government records and information, on the basis of the principles of openness and accountability in government. Before the act, an individual seeking access faced the burden of establishing a right to examine government records. FOIA also established a “right to know” standard for access, instead of a “need to know,” and shifted the burden of proof from the individual to the government agency seeking to deny access. FOIA was enacted in 1966 and was amended in 1974, 1976, 1986, and 1996. The amendments in 1974 through 1986 made changes in procedures, modified exemptions from FOIA, protected sensitive law enforcement information, and created new fee and fee-waiver provisions. The 1996 amendments are known as the e- FOIA amendments, discussed in detail later in this section. FOIA provides public access to government information through two means: affirmative agency disclosure and public request for disclosure. Affirmative agency disclosure takes place in one of two ways. FOIA requires disclosure through Federal Register publication of information, such as descriptions of agency organizations, functions, procedures, rules, and statements of general policy. This has come to be known as the FOIA publication requirement. The act also requires disclosure of final opinions and orders, specific policy statements, certain administrative manuals, and certain records previously released under FOIA to be made available for public inspection and copying. This has come to be known as the FOIA reading room requirement. Public request for disclosure of records is the most well-known part of FOIA. Any member of the public may use it to request access to information held by federal agencies, without showing a need or reasons for seeking the information. Agencies may deny access to material (e.g., by withholding records or redacting information) that falls within any of nine statutory categories of exemptions (see table 3 in app. II). There are also FOIA exclusions for specific, sensitive records held by law enforcement agencies. Agencies have statutory timelines for determining whether to comply with FOIA requests, making determinations with respect to appeals of adverse determinations, and determining whether to provide expedited processing of FOIA requests. Requesters are entitled to be told the reason for denials, to appeal denials, and to challenge them in court. Under the act, agencies are required to submit annual reports on these FOIA activities to the Attorney General. Figure 1 provides an overview of a generic agency FOIA process, from receipt of a request to the release of records. A brief overview of agency FOIA processing is included as appendix II. The 1986 FOIA amendments established the current fee structure. Agencies may assess three levels of fees, each with statutory limitations, according to the type of requester and the intended use of the information sought. The first level of fees includes charges for document search, review, and duplication. These charges apply when records are requested for commercial use, defined in the OMB fee schedule guidelines as “a use or purpose that furthers the commercial, trade or profit interests of the requester or the person on whose behalf the request is being made.” The second level of fees exempts educational or noncommercial scientific institutions and representatives of the news media from being charged search and review fees when records are not requested for commercial use. In such instances, these requesters are charged only for document duplication. The third level of fees, which applies to all requesters who do not fall within either of the preceding two fee levels, consists of reasonable charges for document search and duplication. Except for commercial-use requesters, agencies must provide the first 100 pages of duplication, as well as the first 2 hours of search time, without cost to the requester. Agencies may not charge fees if the government's cost of collecting and processing the fee is likely to equal or exceed the amount of the fee itself. Agencies also may not require a requester to make an advance payment (i.e., payment before work is begun or continued on a request) unless the agency first estimates that the assessable fee is likely to exceed $250, or unless the requester has previously failed to pay a properly assessed fee in a timely manner (i.e., within 30 days of the billing date). Agencies may, however, require payment before records that have been processed are released. Justice oversees agencies’ compliance with FOIA and is the primary source of policy guidance for agencies. Justice’s specific requirements under the act are to make agencies’ annual FOIA reports available through a single electronic access point and notify Congress as to their availability; in consultation with OMB, develop guidelines for the required agency reports, so that all reports use common terminology and follow a similar format; and submit an annual report on FOIA statistics and the efforts undertaken by Justice to encourage agency compliance. In addition, FOIA requires OMB to issue guidelines to “provide for a uniform schedule of fees for all agencies.” Agencies are required to conform their fee schedules to the OMB fee schedule guidelines. E-FOIA requires each agency head to prepare and make publicly available reference material or a guide for requesting information from the agency, including a handbook for obtaining public information. OMB issued an agency guidance memorandum for developing such handbooks. These amendments sought to strengthen the requirement that agencies respond to FOIA requests in a timely manner and reduce their backlogs of pending requests. To that end, the amendments made a number of procedural changes, including providing requesters with an opportunity to limit the scope of their requests so that the requests could be processed more quickly; authorizing agencies to implement multitrack processing, so they could process requests by single and complex tracks, instead of processing all requests on a single-track, first-in/first-out basis (thus giving agencies the flexibility to respond to relatively simple requests more quickly); and requiring agencies to expedite processing for requests meeting the criteria for “compelling need” that warrants prioritization over other requests that were made earlier, with the requirement that an agency determine within 10 days whether to provide such expedited processing. The amendments also required agencies to determine within 20 working days (an increase from the previous 10 days) whether a request would be fulfilled and to notify the requester immediately. Congress did not establish a statutory deadline for making releasable records available, but instead required agencies to make them available promptly. E-FOIA encouraged on-line, public access to government information by requiring agencies to make six specific types of records, created on or after November 1, 1996, available in electronic form. The six elements that the amendments require agencies to make available on line are agency final opinions, including concurring and dissenting opinions, as well as orders, made in the adjudication of cases; statements of policy and interpretations that have been adopted by the agency and are not published in the Federal Register; administrative staff manuals and instructions to staff that affect a member of the public; copies of records that have been released to any person through FOIA and which, because of the nature of their subject matter, the agency determines have become or are likely to become the subject of subsequent requests for substantially the same records; a general index of the “frequently requested records” referred to in the the annual FOIA report. Agencies are also required to make eight types of related information and reference materials publicly available. The law did not explicitly require these elements to be made publicly available in electronic form. These are FOIA fee schedule, an index of major information systems, a description of major information systems, a description of agency record locator systems, and reference materials or handbooks on how to request records or information. Finally, agencies have incorporated features that facilitate public access to government information into their Web sites. These features, which are not required by law, are information on obtaining public services, a FOIA link on the agency home page, a FOIA Web page, Web site search features, ability for requesters to submit requests electronically, electronic links to FOIA office(s), and electronic links to program divisions. According to legislative history, using electronic access to make more affirmative disclosure of the frequently requested material was expected to reduce additional FOIA requests for the same material. This was expected to enable agencies to make better use of their limited resources to complete other, more complex, requests on time. Because the affirmative disclosure provisions had historically been considered to provide access through a physical reading room, the expanded on-line access provisions, including frequently requested records and other required elements, have commonly come to be called “electronic reading room” access. The e-FOIA amendments also made changes to agency reporting requirements. The amendments changed the reporting period from calendar year to fiscal year and allowed agencies more time to prepare their annual reports. Agencies were to provide these reports to the Attorney General by February 1 of each year and to make them available to the public in electronic form. The Attorney General is required to make all agency reports available on line at a single electronic access point and report to Congress no later than April 1 of each year that these reports are available in electronic form. E-FOIA also expanded on the previous reporting requirements. For example, it added requirements for information regarding denials, appeals, the number of requests pending at the end of the fiscal year, the median number of days that requests have been pending, the median number of days required to process requests, the amount of fees collected, and the number of staff devoted to FOIA processing. According to legislative history, these changes were intended to make the reports more useful to the public and Congress by providing more visibility into response times, reasons for not providing a response, resources and workloads, and backlogs of pending requests. The intent was to allow meaningful comparisons among agencies about performance and allow Congress to monitor individual agencies’ progress over time. Within Justice, OIP has lead responsibility for providing guidance and support to federal agencies on FOIA issues. OIP first issued guidelines for agency preparation and submission of annual reports in the spring of 1997 and has periodically issued additional guidance.