Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)

The Freedom of Information Act, commonly known as FOIA, is a U.S. federal law, first enacted in 1966, that gives members of the public the legal right to request access to records held by federal government agencies. The law is built on the principle that government records belong, in a meaningful sense, to the public, and that transparency about how federal agencies operate should be the default position rather than something citizens must justify a special need to obtain.

FOIA applies broadly across the federal government, including financial regulators such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, each of which maintains its own process for receiving and responding to FOIA requests. The law does not create unlimited access, however; it sets out nine specific categories of exemption, covering areas such as national security, internal agency deliberations, and personal privacy, that an agency can cite to withhold all or part of a requested record.

FOIA functions as a legal tool that lets an ordinary person, journalist, researcher, or company ask a federal agency, in effect, "show me the records behind this decision or this activity," and generally requires the agency to either provide those records or explain, under one of the law's specific exemptions, why it is declining to do so. Before FOIA, much of what federal agencies did and why remained largely invisible to the public unless an agency chose to disclose it voluntarily.

• A requester submits a written request, typically through an agency's online FOIA portal, describing the records sought with enough specificity for the agency to locate them.
• The agency has a statutory deadline, generally 20 business days, to respond, though complex requests are often granted extensions.
• If records are withheld in whole or part, the agency must cite the specific exemption relied upon, and the requester can appeal that decision internally and, ultimately, in federal court.

FOIA requests to financial regulators are commonly used by journalists and researchers investigating bank examinations, enforcement actions, and regulatory correspondence, though certain categories of supervisory information, particularly confidential bank examination reports, are frequently withheld under exemptions designed to protect the stability of the examination process. Consumer advocacy groups also use FOIA to obtain aggregated complaint data and enforcement statistics that help the public understand how consistently a regulator is applying its rules across different institutions.

FOIA applies only to federal executive branch agencies, not to Congress, the federal courts, state and local governments, or private companies, including banks themselves, meaning a FOIA request cannot be used to obtain a private company's internal records directly, even if that company is heavily regulated. State governments in the United States generally have their own, separate public records laws, modeled on similar principles but with different procedures, deadlines, and exemptions than the federal FOIA.

Agencies can charge fees for FOIA requests covering search time, document review, and duplication, though fees are often waived or reduced for requesters who can show the information serves the public interest, such as journalists and non-profit researchers, and for requests involving a relatively small amount of staff time. Many agencies, including financial regulators, have built searchable online reading rooms of frequently requested records and prior FOIA responses, specifically to reduce the volume of repetitive requests for information that has already been released once and can simply be reused by later requesters.

When a requester believes an agency has wrongly withheld records, or has failed to respond within the statutory deadline, the requester can sue the agency in federal court to compel disclosure, and courts have the authority to review the withheld material directly and order its release if they find the claimed exemption does not actually apply. A substantial body of case law has developed interpreting FOIA's nine exemptions, particularly around how specific and well-documented a bank examiner's or other agency's justification for withholding financial supervisory information must be before a court will accept it.

• FOIA.gov