Request By:
Mr. Kenneth E. Hollis
General Counsel
Department of Labor
Frankfort, Kentucky 40601
Opinion
Opinion By: Steven L. Beshear, Attorney General; Carl Miller, Assistant Attorney General
You have requested an advisory opinion on two requests for copies of public records made by Mr. Alan Haft, attorney. The description of the material wanted copied is as follows:
1) "Microfiche records of state claims for industrial injury, from 1974 thru 1980, and 1981 information updated on a quarterly basis. The following information should be included: full name, social security number, date of accident, description of injury by part of body affected, indication of type of claim as first aid or lost time, employer claim incurred with, claim or file number, if a disability rating was given, what percent or extent. We would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for the above information. Also, information on the name and address of the insurance carrier on each claim.
2) "Alphabetical computer print out of the following information: Full name, social security number, claim number (or case or file number) and the date filed. Requested are the years 1974-1980 with 1981 information on a quarterly basis. We would be willing to pay a reasonable fee. "
Request number one appears to be for a duplicate of an entire category of records of the Department of Labor. We are treating it, for the purpose of this opinion, as requiring no sorting of material and no exclusion of a part of the record. This office has not heretofore dealt specifically with selling a duplicate of an agency's complete records of one of its divisions or functions.
Our first conclusion is that if an agency believes it to be in the public interest to sell a duplicate of its records, there is no restriction in the open records statute, KRS 61.870-61.884, preventing it from doing so. [Cf: OAG 78-549, where we concluded that the property valuation administrator could not allow inspection or copying of his records for business or commercial purposes because expressly prohibited by statute, KRS 133.045(2).] This leaves the question of whether the Open Records Law mandatorily requires an agency to sell a duplicate of its records which are not exempted from public inspection by one of the exceptions in the Open Records Law or by some other statute.
The declared purpose of the Open Records Law is to allow all persons access to the records which reveal how the public's business is being conducted by public agencies. We do not read the Open Records Law to mandate that an agency must sell a duplicate of its records. It is explicitly a law allowing inspection. As we said in OAG 76-375, the right to a copy of a public record is ancillary to the right to inspect. A public agency need not supply a copy of a record which the requester has not inspected but it may do so, for convenience, if it sees fit.
Request number two, as quoted above, is for selected data which we presume could be extracted by computer. The two requests are the same in that they are both blanket requests for an entire category of records of a public agency. There has been no prior inspection and no selecting of the records to be copied. As we have already stated, we believe that the Open Records Law does not mandate that such copies must be provided. The restrictions placed upon the charging of a fee excluding the cost of staff required buttresses our conclusion that the legislature did not intend to require the preparing of lists, the searching out of documents, or the selling of a duplicate of the complete records of an agency's function. The selling of a duplicate of a record system is a discretionary policy matter to be decided by an agency.