The Business Case for Electronic Redaction

A government agency releases records to a requestor, which appeared to be redacted.  The records were posted to the 'net, and it turns out that the redaction had been carried out by Word. They had highlighted the non-releasable phrases, and changed the color from yellow to black.  Once posted, the materials could easily be downloaded and un-redacted.

Freedom of Information and Access to Information and Privacy Acts establish that agencies must provide the public with access to government information, enabling them to learn more about government operations and decisions.  But not all information held by the government is subject to these Acts.

Given the increasing emphasis on permitting electronic submissions to the government, electronic redaction is the key to document control, storage & retrieval.   

Limitations presented by manual redaction processes:

• Does not easily accommodate for increasing volumes of electronic information

• Paper processes are generally slower than electronic – resulting in increased backlog
• Labor intensive
• Generally can't un-redact
• Hard to gather statistical data

The business case for electronic redaction

The business case for electronic redaction comes from return on investment as a result of time savings and increased productivity which free up resources to allocate to backlog reduction. 

A few of the key areas in which freedom of information and access to information teams can expect returns:

• Processing more requests with greater accuracy in less time
• Reducing backlog
• Tracking the process to the finest detail
• Improving report generation and data quality
• Delivering better client service

Contact us to understand the return on investment the AccessPro Suite can deliver in your operations.