Investigations & compliance reports

An investigation bundles related records requests around a single goal — a story, a case, a question you’re chasing across several agencies. Give it a name and, if you like, a goal, then file requests under it or link existing ones in.

• File a new request under an investigation, or link a request that isn’t in one yet.
• Move a request to a different investigation, or unlink it so it stands alone.
• See an investigation’s status roll up from the requests inside it, and its sibling requests from any one of them.

A request does not have to belong to anything — a request with no investigation is simply a standalone request. In your inbox you can group by investigation, or filter down to one.

An investigation can be marked complete when you’re done with it, and archived to get it out of the way; archived ones stay viewable with “Include archived”. Both are one-way in the app today, so archive when you’re confident rather than to tidy up temporarily.

The Reports page grades how agencies have actually responded to you, grouped by agency, using your workspace’s own history rather than anyone else’s.

Each request is graded across four checkpoints — whether the response met the deadline, how quickly the agency first acknowledged it, what the response actually was, and how complete the response was — and those are averaged into a letter grade.

A checkpoint with nothing to grade yet stays out of the average instead of counting against an agency. Where an AI reading of a reply is uncertain, that checkpoint waits for a person rather than turning a guess into a grade.

Where a statute sets a per-day penalty for an overdue request, PRA Center shows what has accrued: the days overdue multiplied by that statutory rate. It starts at zero until the deadline passes, accrues while the request is overdue, and stops when the request is resolved.

This is an estimate to help you see where you stand, not a legal determination of what any agency owes. Statutes with no per-day penalty show nothing.