Hungarian Post (Magyar Posta) has asked HUF 68 million (about 218 thousand Euro) to make information on its contracts available as open data.

The issue was brought before Péterfalvi Attila, President of the National Authority for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, by Tóth Bertalan, Deputy Faction Leader for the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP). Tóth argued that citizens are restricted in exercising their right of access to public information if an agency asks that much money for its data.

Hourly charges

In its response to Tóth, the legal director of Hungarian Post estimates the number of pages asked for to be around 35,500. He says the costs are necessary to cover the searching for the documents, copying them, reading them, and blacking out non-public information.

He specifies the costs as follows:

• HUF 206,000 (EUR 661) for the media;
• searching and classifying the documents;
• blacking out non-public information;
• a quarter of an hour per page makes 8,875 hours in total;
• each hour is charged at HUF 7469 (EUR 24).

A similar request to the Hungarian Post Holding company (Magyar Posta Befektetési Zrt.) resulted in an estimated cost of HUF 7.5 million (about 24 thousand Euro).

No charges allowed

According to Péterfalvi, public agencies are not allowed to ask money for making available public information, other than the direct cost of the media, i.e. paper and storage devices. Although the legal policy on this is clear, the detailed law actually implementing this policy is not yet in place. A draft was created by the Hungarian Ministry of Justice last year, but the work got stalled and was never continued. Until the law is in place, Péterfalvi says, agencies cannot charge any costs at all.

Other Hungarian public agencies have been using similar tactics to frustrate requests for public information, charging large sums of money for photocopying documents only available on paper.