Virginia FOIA

[Rescue341]

Probably not.



Then if you want them bad enough, provide your ID. It's that simple. I don't think you are going to overcome bureaucratic ennui unless you want to spend a fortune on getting a court order which would, ironically, require your ID.

yea, I've already gave them a call yesterday and let them know I'd come by with my ID later today. I was unsure about it that is why I asked here. Everyone seems to be under the same conclusion. I certainly don't have the clout to try to challenge any of you one. I'm pretty certain you all know way more about this then I do.

 

[PayrollHRGuy]

Now with that all out of the way. How long does everyone think it will be before they pass a law in Virginia that all laws must be written with gender-neutral pronouns?

 

[Tax Counsel]

We got to figure out about those moon men haha, but all jokes aside it is that type of association that originally made me decide to use a pseudo name. I am only a sample size of one but crazy people is were my mind goes when I hear about someone putting in a FOIA Request.

I used to work in the national office of the IRS. The IRS gets a huge number of FOIA requests. The vast majority of those are not filed by "crazy people" or people bent on some weird cause or even social justice warriors. They are filed by lawyers. As a result, there is no general stigma in agencies regarding FOIA requesters as being some kind of nut. What agencies don't like are those requests that are either impossibly broad or too vague to allow for effective processing. They also dislike that they get so many of them and often don't have the resources they really need to process them timely, but that's that's a frustration towards Congress or the state legislature that wrote the law and allocates the funding to carry it out, not a stigma attached to the requesters.

So get over the idea that you'll be labeled as some kook for making the request. The state law allows the state to ask for the name of the person making the request — and that doesn't mean a false name. And no law prohibits the state from asking for ID to verify the requester's identity. So if you want the documents, there really shouldn't be an issue for you here in just providing the identifying information the state seeks.

And, by the way, asking for your ID is not a violation of HIPAA. HIPAA prevents covered entities (primarily health care providers and health insurance companies) from disclosing personal health information (PHI) to others without either consent of the person whose records are requested or a situation that meets one of the exceptions in which consent is not required. So unless this agency is a covered entity, HIPAA will not apply at all. And if it is a covered entity then the law would restrict its ability to disclose PHI to you. It does not prevent a covered entity from asking for ID from the person making requests for records, and indeed a covered entity needs to ask for that information to ensure the PHI is released to someone authorized to get it.

 

[Tax Counsel]

Now with that all out of the way. How long does everyone think it will be before they pass a law in Virginia that all laws must be written with gender-neutral pronouns?

Probably not any time real soon. The legislature can already draft its own laws that way if members feel it's important without need to pass a law mandating it (and courting the controversy that would create) and I doubt that a law requiring local governments to draft laws that way would go over well at all. But should it pass such a law, in the end it wouldn't be a huge deal. It's not all that difficult to write laws that are gender neutral after all.

 

[PayrollHRGuy]

Probably not any time real soon. The legislature can already draft its own laws that way if members feel it's important without need to pass a law mandating it (and courting the controversy that would create) and I doubt that a law requiring local governments to draft laws that way would go over well at all. But should it pass such a law, in the end it wouldn't be a huge deal. It's not all that difficult to write laws that are gender neutral after all.

I guess what I really meant is a law that changes all of the old laws, like the one in this thread, to make them gender-neutral.

VA has gone pretty liberal in the last election.

 

[zddoodah]

Now with that all out of the way. How long does everyone think it will be before they pass a law in Virginia that all laws must be written with gender-neutral pronouns?

Even California doesn't have such a dumb law, and California legislators seem to think the state with the most laws on the books wins some prize.

 

[Tax Counsel]

VA has gone pretty liberal in the last election.

More liberal than before, certainly, especially with the growth in northern VA around the DC area. But it is still not anywhere as liberal as even DC, let alone those bastions of leftism, California and Massachusetts.

Even California doesn't have such a dumb law, and California legislators seem to think the state with the most laws on the books wins some prize.

Yes, that does seem to be the view of the legislature in the People's Republic of California, and apparently most Californians must like that as they keep reelecting those legislators.

 

[cbg]

We don't have such a law in MA, and there's nothing in the state legislature on the subject either. So I wouldn't be looking at VA to blaze that particular trail.