ms. howard here. oftentimes people are frustrated because the law says you need to respond within 20 days, you can give a 10 day extension. oftentimes it's month before they hear again. how do you pick those dates? >> they are just an approximation of when we think the document production will be done. certainly in the case of c 4 issues or the c 4 cases, we had just no idea the volume of documents that would be required. and how long it would actually take for the responses to congress and the investigators to be completed. >> when you do the search you send a request out to anybody you think -- you can't on them to individually do it? you're not -- there's not a foia officer that can get in there and do a search term, pull up every relevant e-mail or document? >> there is no library or -- >> there is. this is a fallacy. it's wrong to say there's no library. it's called e-mail. the reason we moved away from carbon copies and big warehouses with stacks and volumes of file folders is because electronic

ms. howard here. -on-times people are frustrated because the law says you need to respond within 20 days. you can give another 10-day extension but then oftentimes it's months before they hear again. how do you pick those dates? ms. howard: i think namely they are just an approximation of when we think the document production will be done. certainly in the case of the c-4 issues the c-4 cases we just had no idea the volume of documents that would be required and how long it would actually take for the responses to congress and the investigators to be completed. mr. chaffetz: so when you do a search do you send a request out to anybody who you think might think might have and do you count on them individually to do it? you are not able -- there's not a foia officer that can get in there and do a search term pull up every relevant email document? ms. howard: no. there's no library. mr. chaffetz: there is. this is a fall is i. it's wrong to say -- fallacy. it's wrong to say there's no way. it's called em

ms. howard here. oftentimes people are frustrated because the law says you need to respond within 20 days, but oftentimes it is months before they hear again. how do you pick those dates? ms. howard: they are an approximation of when we think the document production will be done. in the case of the c4 cases we had no idea the volume of documents that would be required how long it would take for the response to congress and the investigators to be complete. mr. chaffetz: you count on them to do it? there is not a foia office they can get in there, pull up every relevant e-mail -- ms. howard: there is no library -- mr. chaffe is wrong to say there's notz: library. it is called e-mail. thate reason we moved away from warehouses with file folders is electronically you can push a button, to a search and generate that. this is the year 2015 here. we are not in the stone ages trying to not something out and copy it on a stone. do not tell me it is a database. it is called e-mail and microsoft. ms. howard: fol

ms. howard here but let's go back to ms. bar. this is my last set of questions before i change my mind and ask another one. i want to know what is the instruction that you believe you've been given to interact with the white house? what percentage of the documents do you give to the white house or somebody who represents the white house? what is the expectation that you share information with them? do you need their approval before you send it back? how does that work? because this directive is really clear short, three paragraphs. i mean, they essentially want you to give them everything. and so my question is what do you have to do in order to fulfill the demand from the white house that you give them everything before you give it to us or to the media. >> it does include if the white house has equity in a document. we follow the standard foia process. >> how do you determine if it's white house equity? what is not an equity? >> when we get a request in we have a team of reviewers. and many of these because so much of our work

here. we have a mess with potential criminal obstruction taking place. ms. howard is that what tom fitten described common practice with the irs? >> it's not my experience that it's any practice within the irs. i see no evidence of criminal wrong doing or of any intent to do anything that -- >> so you see no targeting take place? you would deny what has come out pretty nationally -- >> outside of my area of expertise. i can only speak to the records production. >> if someone makes a foia request to the irs is that person potentially now a target for retaliation? >> no, sir. >> okay. so you would deny that there's been any type of retaliation audits, that type of thing from the irs because of people so-called scrutinizing? >> i'm simply saying in my experience the way in which foia requests come in they're logged into a system. the folks who work the foia requests have access to that system. the rest of the irs has no need to have access to that system. so i'm not sure -- >> that's not my question. my question is has the irs participated in retaliation in audits bec

process, with anticipated in his budget not only here in the committee but at the full board is that in connection with the affordable housing funds as ms. howard outline, not only affordable housing bond with our budget process, that every member of the board of supervisors is agreed to cosponsor item number one and is now three and $10 million affordable housing for this november. i will say, i think there's a strong's sentiment outside of city hall but i think we need to continue to press its good to call our collective efforts to get that past is about in november. supervisor avalos >> i forget to mention as you pointed out there's an amendment in the mayors bond around making sure that our local hiring ordinance applies here. that something i found the want to make sure that it gets spelled out. when i does the mention other than the local hire program i know so little oversight because mayor ed lee has been very supportive of our local hire programs and city builder programs. it was very easy to make sure we get this language moving through in the right way. so, i will supportive of that amendment as well. that's on the mayors bond >> tha

ms. howard, thank you for your hard work. to your entire team, that is there supporting you at all times, i drove some you -- i see a lot of them back here. thank you everyone for your hard work at either the long hours, weekends that nobody sees over the last few months, so thank you for all your hard work during the process. i will say, i guess i've only been budget that you chair in my time but i couldn't imagine a better team to work with on the mayor's so thank you to all of you and thank you ms. howard for your partnership in this. in terms of our committee work, we could tactic is to get rid hearings around themes with the recreational park or families or affordability and public safety. i think we were able to do a lot in those hearings and bring up some of the concerns that we had as a board and hear from a community as well. i want to thank all the people i work so hard with us at the board of supervisors on this budget as in every year. first of all, to a controller's office , ben rosenfield, thank you, ben. todd is right there, michelle, lisa is there to your entire team, both you that are here your administration and support

ms. howard, you're now recognized for five minutes. >> thank you for having me here today. i'm mary howard and i'm the director of irs's privacy governmental liaison and disclosure operations. i'm here today to testify on the irs's policies and procedures in regarding and complying with requests for information about the freedom of information act. each year the irs processes thousands of foia requests, most of which require labor intensive searches of both paper and electronic records. despite this volume and complexity, the irs closes more than 80% of its cases in 30 business days or less. the average cycle time generally hovers right around 21 days. the irs follows a standard proceed for handling each foia request it receives. this involves analyzing the request to determine whether it can be processed under foia, determining the scope of the request and searching for responsive records, reviewing material to decide what should be released or withheld and sending a response to the requester. over the last several years our foia operation faced a number of challenges. for

ms. ellmers. >> thank you, mr. chairman. and thank you doctor howard, for being with us. i, too want to thank all of the first responders were hereoday. you know, a very emotional subcommittee hearing. i'm going to try hard to stick to the information and get into some of these questions. along the lines of where we are today, and a known that you have already stated, dr. howard, that as the number of affected first responders have come forward those who have been determined to have cancer, how many are in existence right now? how many are with those? what number do you have of potentially affected patients who have a diagnosis of cancer? >> will, right now we have about 3400 cases of cancer, individual case of cancer. some of those cases may represent an individual that may have more than one cancer, but generally speaking that's the number of members that we have who we are we have certified with cancer. >> as far as the certification process, i'm just curious as to how you determine approval or denial? do you have numbers that play out as far as the possibility of being approved or denied? >> sure. let me just briefly explain

ms. castor: thank you, i yield back. mr. pitts: the chair thanks the gentlelady and recognizes mr. burgess of texas for questions. mr. burgess: thank you, mr. chairman, thank you dr. howard for being here and our witnesses on the second panel, thank you for your participation and the people hearing testament to the work that you've done. i also feel obligated to recognize the work of one of our colleagues, a former member, who was on this committee with us, who was responsible for my early interest in this shortly after i arrived in congress in 2003. because of that interest i did become an early supporter of representative king's work on this. in fact, i was the one who ran the bill on the floor in the waning days of the 111th congress in that late lame duck session in december when the bill finally did pass on the floor of the house. dr. howard, i'm interested in, you said in your testimony that you provided for us today that certain types of cancer were added to the list of health conditions covered under this act. could you share with us what those cancers, what types of cancers these were? are? dr. howard: yes. currently covered in the program are every type of cancer, is the shor