The 30-day FOI clock starts the moment the request lands
Thirty days to produce every interview record. Can you?
Under the FOI Act, Agencies have 30 calendar days to respond to a request for access to documents. Interview notes, assessment records, selection reports, and correspondence about a recruitment decision are all potentially disclosable.
If the relevant records are incomplete, inconsistent, or cannot be located, the Agency faces two bad options: produce inadequate records that may not support the decision, or seek an extension while scrambling to reconstruct what happened. Neither outcome is good, and neither would have arisen if the records had been properly maintained.
The test is not whether records exist somewhere. It is whether they can be located, assembled, and produced in 30 days. Records scattered across individual email accounts, personal drives, and contracted scribes’ files routinely fail that test.