Essential Practice 6: Sufficient reasons for issuing a summons
To allow us to appropriately assess the issue of a summons, in particular its relevance to an investigation, agencies should provide a sufficiently detailed explanation of the reasons for summonsing the information or documents, including the basis for summonsing extensive information.
Context
Where an agency has issued a summons1 requiring a recipient to produce a document/thing or to give evidence, a key consideration in our review of the notification is to assess whether the requirement may reasonably be considered as assisting the agency to achieve the purposes of the investigation.
To make this assessment, we require sufficient contextual information to determine the relevance of the information or documents summonsed. This information is included in a report accompanying the summons notification.
Assessing the relevance and scope of a summons, ensures that agencies have lawful and reasonable bases for the summons and that the scope is relevant to the investigation. Where a summons requires extensive information, such as information over a long timeframe, affecting multiple persons, or covering a range of documents, further information about the reasons for the scope may be required. This may include, why a long timeframe was specified, practices about filtering and managing unnecessary information and why information about specific persons has been sought.
In our report on the Victorian Ombudsman's use of coercive powers, we noted instances where we requested additional information about extensive requests made in summonses. VO agreed to document in the accompanying report consideration of scope, and how it would manage unrelated information. We also noted the VO had generally provided limited information relating to the reasons for issuing a summons.2
Footnotes
1 Depending on the agency a ‘summons’ may also be referred to as ‘a notice’ or ‘a request’.
2 See 'Compliance case study on the use and oversight of coercive powers'.
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