Cite Your Exemption: A 2026 Audit of How Illinois Public Bodies Justify Every Black Bar

A redacted page is a claim. Somewhere under that black rectangle sits a public record, and the agency asserting it belongs to one of the narrow exceptions the General Assembly wrote into the Freedom of Information Act. The question this audit asks is simple: when an Illinois public body blacks something out, does it hand the requester the paperwork needed to disagree?

Under 5 ILCS 140/9(a), a denial — full or partial — must be in writing, must state the reasons for the denial, and must include the specific statutory exemption claimed. Section 9(b) covers the partial case: where part of a record is withheld, the agency must preserve the remainder and explain the withholding. Read together, those two provisions describe something closer to a receipt than a courtesy. The statute contemplates a citizen holding a piece of paper that names the exemption, points to the record, and gives them sixty days to ask the Public Access Counselor to review it.

That is the theory. What follows is what the paper actually looks like.

What we reviewed

Illinois Open Gov submitted or collected 96 FOIA responses issued between January and October 2026 by 41 public bodies: nine state agencies, eleven counties, fourteen municipalities, and seven special districts. The requests covered four recurring categories of withheld material — personnel and disciplinary files, pre-decisional deliberative material, security and critical-infrastructure detail, and law-enforcement investigative records.

For each response we recorded whether the agency (1) named a statutory exemption by section and subsection; (2) described the withheld material with enough specificity that a reader could tell what was removed and roughly how much; (3) provided an exemption log or itemized index; and (4) supplied appeal language identifying the Public Access Counselor and the sixty-day window under Section 9.5(a). Each response received a letter grade.

The grading scale

An A response cited the exemption by subsection, described the withheld category in plain language, estimated the volume removed, and included complete appeal instructions. A B cited the statute but offered only a generic category label. A C cited the statute incorrectly, cited a section that does not exist, or invoked an exemption plainly inapplicable to the record at hand. A D withheld material with no citation at all. An F withheld material, described nothing, and omitted appeal rights.

What the receipts show

Across the 96 responses, 54 percent earned an A or B. That headline number is the most encouraging figure in this audit and the least useful, because the distribution is not random. The quality of a redaction receipt tracks the size of the body and the sophistication of its FOIA officer far more closely than it tracks the sensitivity of the record.

State agencies performed best: 71 percent of their responses earned an A or B, with the Department of Central Management Services and the Illinois Department of Transportation producing the cleanest citations in the sample. Municipalities split badly. The larger suburbs and downstate cities with dedicated records officers matched state performance; smaller villages often returned a single blacked-out page with a cover letter reading, in substance, that the material was "confidential."

Twenty-three percent of responses earned a D or F. In eleven cases, the agency cited no statutory authority whatsoever. In six, the citation referenced a section number that does not appear in the Act.

Personnel files: the most-cited, least-explained category

The exemption invoked most often in our sample was Section 7(1)(c), the personal-privacy provision, typically applied to disciplinary records. Illinois courts have made clear that 7(1)(c) is not a blanket shield for anything filed in a personnel folder; it requires a balancing of the private interest against the public interest in disclosure, and the balance shifts when the discipline concerns a public employee's official conduct.

Only fourteen of the thirty-eight responses withholding personnel material explained that balancing at all. The rest offered a label — "personnel information, exempt pursuant to 7(1)(c)" — and stopped. A requester reading that sentence has no way to know whether the agency weighed anything or simply reached for the most familiar citation in the statute.

Deliberative process: cited for records that were never deliberative

The second pattern is more troubling because it is more easily checked. Section 7(1)(f) protects pre-decisional, deliberative material — recommendations, drafts, opinions exchanged before a decision crystallizes. It does not protect the decision itself, nor the final executed document.

Our sample included nine instances in which 7(1)(f) was invoked to withhold a record that appeared, from the agency's own description, to be final: an executed intergovernmental agreement, a signed lease amendment, a completed budget line item. In each case the agency produced the exemption label without an index, leaving the requester to guess whether the withheld pages were drafts or the deed itself.

Security and investigative records: where volume estimates matter most

Section 7(1)(d) and the critical-infrastructure provisions of Section 7(1)(v) generated the largest redactions in the sample — single responses running to hundreds of partially blacked-out pages, with entire pages removed. These are the records where an exemption log is least optional and most often absent. Only three of the seventeen responses in this category provided an itemized index of what was removed.

A withholding log is not a burdensome invention. It is a table: page number, exemption claimed, one-line description. Agencies that maintain one — and several in our sample clearly do — produce responses that a requester can actually contest. Agencies that do not leave citizens arguing with a rectangle.

The fix that costs nothing

The audit's central finding is that the largest gap between Illinois' redaction practice and its redaction law is not legal, technical, or budgetary. It is clerical. Every item in our grading rubric can be satisfied with language the agency already possesses at the moment it decides to withhold.

Three practices separate the A responses from the F responses, and all three are free:

• Cite to the subsection, not the section. "Section 7(1)" tells a requester nothing. "Section 7(1)(f)" tells them which argument to make.
• Describe, don't label. "Pre-decisional staff recommendation regarding the 2026 rate schedule" supports a challenge or a concession. "Deliberative" does not.
• Keep an index. A page-by-page log converts an opaque withholding into a reviewable one and protects the agency as much as the requester.

What a citizen can do with a bad receipt

A deficient citation does not end a request. Under Section 9.5(a), a requester may file a request for review with the Public Access Counselor in the Attorney General's office within sixty days of the denial. Illinois courts have generally expected agencies to supply enough detail that a reviewing body can assess the claimed exemption without guessing, which means a bare label is a weak position, not a final answer.

Our recommendation to readers is procedural: keep the denial letter, note the date it arrived, and if the citation is missing or mismatched, say so in writing in the review request. The statute already requires the agency to show its work. Asking them to do it is not an imposition on government — it is the transaction the Act describes.