Archived [2008-11] – Investigator's Guide to Interpreting the Act
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The Investigator’s Guide was removed from the website in April 2021 and is currently available solely for the above-mentioned activities.
We invite you to consult the Information Commissioner’s Guidance section where you will find up-to-date information on how we approach investigations and interpret the Access to Information Act.
In addition, the Information Commissioner posts final reports on her investigations on the website to provide guidance to both institutions and complainants. Using the database, you can sort through the decisions with the relevant sections of the Act.
Complaint: The CBC exempted all records containing certain internal accounting codes and certain credit card numbers, claiming the exemption that protects any information that might facilitate the commission of an offence (subsection 16(2)).
Investigation: The OIC learned CBC access officials had begun automatically exempting such records in an attempt to keep up with a flood of requests it had received upon becoming subject to the Act. However, when pressed during the investigation to prove that the exemption actually applied to the information, access officials conceded that, in order to commit an offence using the internal codes, a breakdown of CBC accounting controls would have to happen at several levels.
Outcome: The CBC released the accounting codes. The OIC agreed, though, that releasing the credit card numbers could facilitate the commission of an offence. As such, this information remained protected.
Information Commissioner’s position:
- When deciding to withhold information under section 16, institutions must assess and then demonstrate how its disclosure would result in probable harm to the particular interest it has identified—financial harm, in this case.
- When institutions cannot demonstrate the harm, they must disclose the information.