FOIA and Open Records Anonymous Requests
What is a FOIA request and how can you submit a FOIA request that’s important to you, while remaining completely anonymous?
Freedom of Information Act requests and state open records searches are challenging and notoriously time-consuming because of the laborious process and diligent follow-up required. This can become even more difficult when you want to remain anonymous or make multiple requests at different agencies.
Whether you need agency deliberations, details about the award of government contracts, information for political campaigns, evidence for cases in litigation, or a public document that isn’t readily available, we can manage the request process on your behalf while your identity remains confidential.
When a person wants to send an anonymous request, they can select the “Anonymous Request” page on the FOIA Portal, which allows them to send a request without revealing their account information.
From forms to fees, every part of your anonymous FOIA request will be under the Anonymous ArkCase username, keeping you and your company completely anonymous.
By requesting a FOIA request anonymously, your name will not be visible to both the creator and other users. Whether you use the online portal or simply call an agent to fulfill the request on your behalf you are not required to include contact information. Furthermore, after you submit an anonymous request, you are provided with a unique code which enables you to check for updates about your request and access documents both online or through an agent.
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See Video Transcription
Hi I’m Martin Mateski. I’m an ArkCase product owner and today I’m going to show you a totally new functionality regarding anonymous request.
If a user clicks on the anonymous request form, you will see that this allows requesters to fill in the information about the request that they are submitting.
So organizations have the capability of modifying this custom web form to really meet the requirements of the intake process for each individual organization.
In today’s demo I’m basically using essentially a really standard intake form where the requester can fill out some basic information regarding their request.
If they know the department they can fill it out, so I’m going to go ahead fill out some of these.
In section Three, the requester can type in a title and also they can have the capability of entering really a detailed description of the request, so the requester or the organization can know what the requester is really asking for.
So let’s say please provide budget for 2021.
They can attach documents, they can provide additional information and even request we favor.
If a user clicks on submit for a request they have the ability to really validate on the all the information regarding their inputs and this allows them to have a re-preview of everything they edited.
If a requester has a need to edit something they can go way back and make some corrections or additions.
So in this case they can click on submit for a request and they can submit the request to the application.
This is the only time the user is provided with this unique identity number that this enables them to track the request, so they can copy it and at any time go into the anonymous request status page, paste this unique number and make a search.
This will give back their exact request in this case the state budget and the state that is in.
If there are if it is finished the user can have the ability to download its documents.
So now I’m going to navigate back to the arcades application and we can see what the actual employee can do on this request.
If we go into the fourier requests and say let’s see all open requests the user can see that this anonymous request was already created.
But also this request if we go into the people module we can see that there is no person that created it, but it is anonymous and the only people that show up is the anonymous requester.
This is our person that actually is responsible for all anonymous equates requests made on the public portal.
So if we go into requests we can see all the requests that were actually made by various requesters online.
So that’s it for today you can reach me at info@arkcase.com or visit us at arkcase.com
Thanks for watching and we’d love to hear from you.