24 February 2012 The Age Investigations Unit 655 Collins Street DOCKLANDS VIC 3008 Attention: Ms Melissa Fyfe

PO Box 2750 Melbourne Victoria 3000 ABN 56 375 109 796

Dear Ms Fyfe, FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST I refer to your letter dated 6 February 2012, received by CenITex on 10 February 2012, in which you sought access under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (FOI Act) to: 1. Any reports, memos or briefs from CenITex to the Department of Treasury and Finance, the State Services Authority or the Department of Premier and Cabinet documenting the savings achieved due to CenITexs centralisation of IT services across the Victorian public sector in the seven-month period from 1 July 2011 to 1 February 2012. As you are aware, the FOI Act creates a right of access to documents of an agency. Section 13 of the Act states that the right of access is to be exercised in accordance with this Act. Section 17 of the FOI Act sets out the procedural requirements to be satisfied for a valid request for access to documents to exist. One of those requirements is that the request must provide such information concerning the documents you seek as is reasonably necessary to enable the agency to identify the documents sought. That is, an applicant must strive to define with as much precision as possible the documents sought in terms that would enable an appropriate officer of the agency to constructively search for those documents. If a request is ambiguous, unclear or otherwise ill defined, it does not comply with the FOI Act and need not be processed. It should not be for the officers of the agency to be left guessing what documents you are actually seeking. In addition, a request must be for specific documents or groups of documents and not for every document in a broad category. As VCAT has recently stated in relation to ambiguous requests:1
It is not the task of the responsible officer to try to tease out from such a request what the applicant might be getting at. Firstly, for the responsible officer to do that would be a failure on the part of that responsible officer to undertake the statutory task set by section 17(2), and secondly, the responsible officer might inadvertently provide documents which are not what the applicant was seeking which would inevitably lead to unnecessary and possibly protracted correspondence between the applicant and the responsible officer in an effort to try to work out what is constituted by the request, and at worst the making of an unnecessary application for review.

Zeqaj v Victoria Police [2010] VCAT 1132 at [31].

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED

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At present there are three matters which have the effect that your request does not, unfortunately, provide sufficient information for me to identify the documents you seek. I make the following comment about your request, which is presently ambiguous and unclear, and because of which a search for documents has not been commenced. First, your request seeks any of certain specific documents. Could you please let me know if you mean that you seek only one document which contains the information described and that single document would suffice, or whether you seek all such documents in the possession of CenITex. Secondly, it is ambiguous as to what is meant by the term documenting the savings achieved. Do you seek a document recording the amount of any such savings, or do you seek documents which set out or describe how any savings are achieved (regardless of whether they record the amount of any savings), or do you seek something else? Thirdly, it is uncertain and ambiguous what you mean by the phrase the savings achieved due to CenITexs centralisation of IT services across the Victorian public sector.

Accordingly, consistently with my obligations under the FOI Act, I invite you to consult in writing with CenITex with a view to amending or clarifying your request so that it is in a form which complies with s 17 of the FOI Act and provides the information necessary to enable CenITex to identify the document(s) sought. Alternatively, you may wish to submit an amended request to clarify the issues raised above. Until your request is made in a manner required by s 17 of the FOI Act it cannot be processed and the 45 day time period within which a decision must be made on your request has not commenced to run. Yours sincerely

Ross Gilmour CenITex Director Corporate Communications

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