One month after Gov. Jenniffer González Colón signed Senate Bill 63, which amended the Transparency Law, attorney Verónica Ferraiuoli, coordinator of the Initiative for Deregulation and Administrative Efficiency (IDEA, in Spanish), announced with great media fanfare the creation of the Public Transparency Portal, a digital platform “to submit and track public information requests” sent to agencies in the executive branch. Eight months after that announcement, the González Colón administration has not spoken publicly about the platform again or carried out an educational campaign encouraging the public to use it, despite claiming to have trained hundreds of government officials to use it. What can be seen, however, is an “administrative silence”: a term the portal uses to indicate that the deadline established by law for an agency to respond to a request has expired without an answer.
In practice, the platform has added yet another layer of bureaucracy to the obstacles Puerto Ricans face in exercising their right to know.
The portal has design flaws and problems with its legal content that not only make it difficult to use but also confuse the public about what our legal system allows. On this digital form, users select the government entity and fill out several fields identifying themselves and specifying the information they want to request.
Although it is not a required field, the form includes a section asking users to state the purpose of the request and indicate whether the requester represents a private entity or a news organization, or is making the request in a personal capacity, among other categories. The Transparency Law does not require the collection of this information, and doing so runs counter to the constitutional principle established by the Puerto Rico Supreme Court that “every citizen, by the mere fact of being one, has the ‘special interest’ necessary to request access to public documents.” In other words, the government has no business asking about or investigating a person’s reasons for requesting public information. Why does the government, through this new “transparency portal,” want to know what motivates those who scrutinize its work? Will it keep a list of these explanations?
The portal also has a required certification check-box without which a request cannot be submitted. It requires users to affirm “that the process requested here is limited to access to public information contained in existing documents held by the Executive Branch of the Government of Puerto Rico.” This language, which stems from the recent anti-transparency amendments to the law, is based on an incorrect legal interpretation that restricts access to documents. It ignores the fact that in Puerto Rico, the right is to information in its broadest sense, as recognized since 1982 in Soto v. Secretario de Justicia, regardless of whether that information is contained in multiple documents or files or in different formats.
Adding to the confusion are certain answers in the portal’s frequently asked questions section, which provide incomplete information and introduce made-up concepts that do not appear in the Transparency Law. For example, in explaining what information may be requested, the portal gives a restrictive definition of “public information” limited to documents generated by an agency, even though several laws establish that a person has the right to demand information that an agency “retains or receives,” such as information produced by a contractor. Could it be that they do not want the public to know about the work of private third parties that provide products and services to the country?
This section also introduces the new and problematic concept of “administrative silence,” which indicates that the 20 or 30 business-day deadline for responding to a request has expired. In that case, the portal tells the requester to “contact the agency directly to check the status of your request.” This concept is not contemplated in the Transparency Law, and although the invitation to contact the agency may be well-intentioned, it ignores the fact that no response amounts to a rejection or denial of the request. Of course, one can follow up with the agency, and there may be goodwill, but the requester’s only remedy is to go, with or without legal representation, to the Court of First Instance and file a legal action to vindicate their rights. Could “administrative silence” be a linguistic trap that allows an agency to “buy time” and avoid a lawsuit?
As if that were not enough, checking the status of a request and communicating with the agency through the digital tool is a cumbersome and technically complicated process. Each request generates a unique code, sent by email, without which the requester cannot access the process. Anyone who submits a large number of requests has to save every code; otherwise, they will not be able to access the requests or their updates. Worse yet, any follow-up communication with the agency cannot be done through the platform and must instead be sent in a separate email. How could all this bureaucracy not discourage someone who wants to ask questions of those who govern them and of public officials?
When presenting the portal, Ferraiuoli said they wanted “the government to be accountable, transparent and restore the public’s trust,” trust that, according to her, is sometimes damaged “not because someone wants to hide something,” but because the process is not as clear or direct as it should be. She insisted that it is not that agencies do not “want to answer,” but that “they simply get lost in the process.” The portal was presented as the solution to the problems the government faces in responding to requests made under this fundamental right. Yet the experience of journalists, organizations, and civic and environmental groups in recent months shows that the difficulties in accessing government data have continued and, in some cases, worsened.
For example, independent journalist Carlos Berríos Polanco submitted nearly 50 requests through the portal when it launched, primarily to the Puerto Rico Police Bureau, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources (DRNA, in Spanish). To date, he has received responses to only about five, or 10%. For the rest, he received the automated “administrative silence” message generated by the portal. Curiously, this experience stands in contrast to his extensive experience submitting requests to federal agencies and agencies in other U.S. jurisdictions. Discouraged, Berríos Polanco stopped using the portal several months ago because he came to believe that its only purpose was to shift responsibility for responding from agencies and officials to the platform through preprogrammed messages.
For its part, the University of Puerto Rico Environmental Law Clinic, directed by professor José Arturo Maldonado Andreu, has had mixed experiences requesting permit records from various agencies on behalf of activists and communities concerned about construction projects affecting them. Maldonado Andreu sees it as a positive that the portal automatically provides the dates when deadlines expire, and he said some information officers have contacted him to better understand his requests. Still, he agrees that following up through the platform is difficult and that some agencies, such as the DRNA, with or without the portal, continue to ignore his requests.
Journalists at the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI) have not used the portal, precisely because of these problems. They have continued submitting their requests to agencies’ press staff and information officers. That has not stopped multiple agencies from demanding that information or press requests be routed through the platform. In each case, they have been reminded that Ferraiuoli herself emphasized that this tool — the portal — is not contemplated in the Transparency Law and that, therefore, the public, including the press, may continue submitting requests by email. Nonetheless on more than one occasion, agencies contacted by CPI have conditioned the release of public information on submitting the request through the portal.
Around the world, there are transparency portals that work very well. The organization Access Info Europe developed AsktheEU, a platform that allows users to submit requests to the various bodies of the European Union, publicly track the progress of each request in real time and appeal a denial through the same tool. In the United States, the organization MuckRock has a platform that allows users to submit requests to federal and state agencies and even generates automated follow-up messages as deadlines approach. Both offer extensive educational materials about the applicable laws and rights. And both, not coincidentally, emerged from civil society efforts rather than from government.
It should come as no surprise that the Public Transparency Portal serves as a vehicle for adding bureaucracy while also becoming a new “scapegoat” for the current administration’s inaction on government accountability.
Since June, CPI has been requesting information from the Puerto Rico Innovation and Technology Service (PRITS) about the creation of this platform. The agency provided hundreds of emails that had been printed and then scanned into PDFs, many of them low-quality and difficult to read and analyze. Even so, we were able to confirm that, while the platform was being developed by the firm Paoli Group, there were discussions aimed at determining what personal identifying information could be asked to requesters and on what “predefined” grounds requests could be denied.
Since June 2025, months before the law was amended, the consulting firm had been asking attorneys at PRITS and La Fortaleza to confirm whether the digital form could require requesters to state the purpose of their request and whether members of the press could be required to identify themselves as such, specify the news outlet they represented and provide an identification number. None of this is required by either the original Transparency Law or its amendments. Was Paoli Group unfamiliar with the law governing the tool it had been hired to develop, or were they trying to legislate through the programming of a platform?
We do not know how the attorneys at PRITS and La Fortaleza responded because their answers were not included in the documents provided, but we do know that the portal currently asks for some of this information. The firm also asked whether, instead of “administrative silence” for overdue requests, it could use the word “expired.” We now know that the government opted for the ambiguous “administrative silence.” Also noteworthy is an email from then-Deputy Secretary of the Governorship Itza García, sent 10 days before the governor signed the amendments, asking the contractor to add, among the options for rejecting a request, that it is “too general or vague.” That reason for denial also has no place in our constitutional framework.
Today, on the International Day for Universal Access to Information, I have some advice for the current administration: If it truly wants to restore “the public’s trust” when it comes to transparency, it should start by repealing the disastrous amendments it passed on a whim and removing from the portal everything that our fundamental right does not require. And to Ferraiuoli, who assured us that the portal would help agencies that “get lost in the process,” I ask that she explain why communications between contractors and the government’s own officials suggest that the portal was designed so that it is the public that gets lost in the process. Let’s hope her answer isn’t an “administrative silence,” too.
This translation was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and clarity.
