Recall that, rather some time ago, I'd made an OIA request of Inland Revenue for the data that they had collected on tax attitudes. IRD was under fire for what was considered to be partisan polling. I'd never considered it to have been partisan; tax attitudes and how they align with political party affiliation is interesting for both the tax department and more generally.
So I figured that IRD's best move would have been simply to release the data broadly, so they couldn't be accused of having gathered it for Labour.
IRD didn't do that, so I put in an OIA request for the data.
And waited.
That whole saga and appeals to the Ombudsman are summarised here.
And now I've a very nice letter back from the Ombudsman, copied below. There are a few very nice slaps in there about IRD's needing to remember its duties.
I will be interested to see how IRD replies to this.
This is a good outcome and thank you for following up.
ReplyDeleteBiggest laugh for an IT guy, difficult to recover from backup because "decryption". Let's just say that if it was really at all difficult, someone already has a much bigger problem on their hands.