In this letter, Deputy General Counsel for Administrative Hearings Russell J. Hanks describes how the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA) complies with the requirements of 7 CFR § 273.15(g)(5), 42 CFR § 43 1.244(g), 45 CFR § 205.10(a)(19) and State Administrative Procedure Law (SAPA) § 307[3](a) to provide public access to Fair Hearing Decisions.
Mr. Hanks explains, at p. 1, that
this Office indexes its fair hearing decisions by issue code. However, we are not limited to searching simply by issue code. We are able to filter through hundreds of thousands of decisions, limiting the search with variables such as agency involved, time-frame and hearing outcome, among many other possible data elements, in order to help identify the particular hearing decisions sought by a requestor. Once the search is completed and the decisions requested are identified, we insure proper redaction in order to protect confidentiality and then make the fair hearing decisions available to the requestor for inspection and copying." We can provide the decisions to the requestor in either paper or electronic format.
At p. 2, Mr. Hanks reveals that
given the advances in technology, we are in the early stages of exploring the possibility of posting our fair hearing decisions on the OTDA web site. As you might imagine, considering the more than 120,000 decisions issued annually by OTDA, this would be a significant undertaking, dwarfing the web sites noted in your letter that post less than 300 decisions annually.
The federal regulations and SAPA § 307 can be accessed from the "Fair Hearing Laws and Regulations" page at: http://onlineresources.wnylc.net/FairHearingResources/showfaq.asp?fldAuto=15
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