Linda at Celtic Diva wrote last week that she was being charged $65,706 for her request for public records. She posted the following response she got to her request:
To provide complete responses to the email portions of your request, we will need to electronically search the email accounts of the 71 current and former employees who have worked in the Governor's Executive Offices since December 2006. For that electronic search, we will need the assistance of the State Security Office in the Department of Administration, Division of Enterprise Technology Services (ETS). ETS estimates that each email account retrieval, search, and record production will require 16 hours to complete. The ETS hourly rate is $54.84, so ETS estimates its costs per email account will be $925.44. Based on that estimate, ETS's estimated costs for obtaining records from 71 employee email accounts total $65,706.
I have a search function on my email. I can get the list of emails I've received and sent to someone up in a couple of minutes. Why should it take computer experts so much longer?
I asked someone I know and trust on technology issues. Here's my source's response to the question whether it should really take that long to do such a search:
no. it's stonewalling. it's not impossible that it took 16 hours the
first time, if they spent 15.5 hours screwing around, but for all
future times, it ought to take 5 minutes.
Aside from that, am I missing something? Let's see:
$54.84 * 16 hours = $925.44
How did they get that? When I do it by hand I get $877.44. When I do it again on a calculator I get the same. If they can't even multiply correctly, how can they be expected estimate the time correctly, or even do the programming they need to find the emails?
But $877.44 is still outrageous and $62,297.24 ($877.44*71 searches) is still way too pricey.
I also looked up ETS on the web. They have a link to a page of consulting rates. There's no position listed at $54.84.
Maybe Sarah Palin is beginning to understand why Randy Ruedrich was so irritated with her when she made ethics complaints against him. Do you think she's apologized to him?
Nice catch on the fuzzy math, and even fuzzier reasoning being used!
ReplyDeleteI enjoy your posts. Keep up the good work.
-Washington
In Hungary they give much higher punishment fees, to teach the lesson. let's say one bus ticket is $1.30 (290Ft) and we have to pay $28.57 if we want to pay right on the place where we were caught and $57.15 if we do it later but within 30 days. After 30 days we have to play like $95.20.
ReplyDeleteIf we divide $65 706 by $877.44 then we get 74.88 so she has to pay approximately 75 times more. If you divide $95.20 by $1.30 we get approximately 73.
Your friend's case is a 4 year old case so if she was in Hungary then uh... she would need to pay more. They would add many fines for being late, then I am sure that they could find laws which were broken, then this punishment ratio is also added blah blah... so it wouldn't be cheap. I transferred this amount to Forints and that's quite serious. I mean if she was perculating she would surely be in prison. There is a "famous" law suit in Hungary with a politician who perculated money which is like 4 times bigger than her deficit and this trial has been going on for years.
So as a conclusion I can't see the problem. As you said "Americans do expect to have a certain level of comfort. Central Europeans probably are much more flexible." But they may not have the right to expect that.
Ropi, I didn't explain the case here very well. This is NOT a fine. Instead, the person is a blogger. She didn't violate any laws. She has asked the State of Alaska to give her copies of official emails.
ReplyDeleteThe State is saying it will cost $65,000 (12,823,199.92 Hungarian FL) to retrieve the emails she requested.
Here's part of the law:
AS 40.25.110. Public Records Open to Inspection and Copying; Fees.(a) Unless specifically provided otherwise, the public records of all public agencies are open to inspection by the public under reasonable rules during regular office hours. The public officer having the custody of public records shall give on request and payment of the fee established under this section or AS 40.25.115 a certified copy of the public record.
(b) Except as otherwise provided in this section, the fee for copying public records may not exceed the standard unit cost of duplication established by the public agency.
It goes to (i).
Well, then I misunderstood. Then it is an example of the low quality of US Maths education. At least secondary school tasks suck there. We had an American book 2 years ago (my only weak year at maths) and I did around 95% all the time from them while I had much weaker scores from Hungarian tasks.
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