“Grade inflation” is what the National Security Archive howls about a new Department of Justice internal analysis of its compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.

“Primarily, …the DOJ OIP has, once again, cooked its books to omit huge quantities of unfulfilled FOIA requeststs from its analyses,” a post on the archive’s Unredacted site declares.

Conceding the report is overall “a useful synthesis of information,” the archive says it falls down on the key metric that proclaims “records are released in “more than 92 percent of requests where records are processed for disclosure.”

The problem is requests NOT processed for disclosure. “These non-processed (and apparently non-counted) requests include those that were denied due to: fees (pricing requesters out); referrals (passing the request off to another agency while the requester still waits); “no records”  responses (very frequently the result of inadequate searches); and requests “improper for other reasons” (which ostensibly include the “can neither confirm nor deny” glomar exemption).”

Earlier this year, the National Security Archive awarded the DOJ its “Rosemary Award” for “worst open government performance by a government agency.”