Finance department unveils FOI manual

The Department of Finance (DOF) recently released its Peo­ple’s Freedom of Information (FOI) manual in keeping with the people’s constitutional right to information and the govern­ment’s policy of full disclosure of its transactions involving public interest, subject to reasonable conditions prescribed by law.

In Department Order 061- 2016, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III promulgated the 19-page FOI Manual, which states in detail what types of information can and cannot be released to the public, the pro­cesses of filing requests for in­formation and appeals involving the grant or denial of request for access to information before the DOF Central Appeals and Re­view Committee and, whenever necessary, the Office of the Pres­ident (OP).

The manual covers re­quests for access to informa­tion filed with the Office of the Secretary of the DOF and all its attached agencies and bureaus, “until such time as FOI manuals specific to each of the attached bureaus and agencies shall have been adopted and promulgated separately” by these offices.

The DOF released the man­ual in time for the re-launching of the government’s online cen­tral database—Open Data Phil­ippines at www.data.gov.ph—as part of the implementation of President Duterte’s Executive Order (EO) No. 2 on freedom of information.