Information Commissioner Gitanjali Gutierrez has upheld a decision by the Bermuda Monetary Authority to withhold records about its staff recruitment plans.

But she has told the authority it must reveal whether such a record exists and whether it includes an analysis of the Bermudian or non-Bermudian status of potential new recruits.

A public access to information request for the recruitment plans was submitted to the BMA in August 2018, shortly after it published a consultation paper on proposed fee changes.

The paper said a proposal to revise supervisory fees was based on a review carried out with the help of an international management consultant, which found that the BMA needed to hire up to 39 additional full-time employees by 2020 to enable it to continue to discharge its statutory duties effectively.

The Pati requester asked for an analysis of the extra staff required, broken down by department and by Bermudian/non-Bermudian status, as well as the reasons for increased staff in each department.

The BMA rejected the request on the basis that disclosure was prohibited under the BMA Act 1969. It also refused to confirm the existence or non-existence of such a record.

Ms Gutierrez agreed in her decision that disclosure of the requested records was prohibited by the BMA Act, because they were received by the BMA as part of its statutory duty to regulate financial institutions.

But she said the public authority was not justified in refusing to confirm the existence or non-existence of a record related to its recruitment plans, analysed by the Bermudian or non-Bermudian status of the additional staff.

The Information Commissioner ordered the BMA to disclose the existence or non-existence of the record to the requester by October 5.

She said: “The question here is not whether the content of [the] records ... should be disclosed but whether disclosure of the existence or non-existence of those records is in the public interest.

“The question of a Bermudian analysis in the recruitment and succession plan for any public authority is a topic of widespread public discussion and impact, particularly with respect to critical public authorities such as the BMA.”

Ms Gutierrez added that there was a “strong public interest in knowing whether records concerning a Bermudian analysis exist or do not exist as part of the BMA’s analysis of its staffing needs, recruitment and succession planning”.

She said: “In the face of a strong public interest supporting disclosure, it is difficult to identify a countering public interest in the non-disclosure of the existence or non-existence of these records.”

The Information Commissioner stressed that her decision did not confirm whether the Bermudian and non-Bermudian analysis record existed.