Frank Munger from the Knoxville News on slow response to FOIA at the Department of Energy:
The Dept. of Energy's Inspector General, in a newly released follow-up audit, found that DOE still hasn't fixed some of its problems in retaining and managing electronic records. That includes the handling of e-mail.
He links to the audit itself, IG-0838 (PDF). An excerpt demonstrates that agency culture has an element of self-deception as to their actual preparedness, not only for answering FOIA requests, but more generally to their own capabilities.
To further demonstrate issues with records management, we noted that a recent report issued by NARA found that a self-assessment completed by the Department indicated no significant weaknesses surrounding records management. However, the state of the program as reflected in this self-assessment was in stark contrast to the situation we observed during our review. (p. 5)
Generally speaking, if an organization's records are in complete disarray, it can be unsurprising that a FOIA request asking for records will take a long time to be processed.
