Andy Miller

Key roles and responsibilities;

• I provide comprehensive guidance, training and advice on Information Rights legislation, case handling processes and departmental Information Rights policy to stakeholders at all levels and across every area of the department.
• I engage with information owners on how to process Freedom of Information (FOI) requests and produce clear and concise responses. Providing advice on wording, grammar and formatting, in line with the Government Digital Service style guide. I am responsible for confirming that responses are compliant with the Freedom of Information Act 2000 by ensuring all legally required information has been released, and any exemptions have been appropriately applied.
• I am responsible for ensure that all FOIs are handled in accordance with the department's internal clearance processes. Engaging with Press Office and Director General Private Offices on sensitive cases and topics that are of high media/public interest.
• I manage a varied and time sensitive case load, working collaboratively with information owners and stakeholders to ensure high quality and legally compliant responses are processed within internal and statutory deadlines.
• I maintain the department's case management system by ensuring that user accesses are up to date and amending the organisation structure when appropriate.
• I use the case management system to produce Management Information data relating to performance statistics. Using this data to understand how the department is performing against the Information Commissioners Office's targets and analysing the data to determine where additional support may be required at a team level.
• For three years, in addition to my regular duties, I managed the Information Rights Unit's process team. Managing duty rosters, quality assuring work, conducting Performance Management Reviews, and all other HR aspects. Ensuring the team's essential administrative works was completed within deadline.

Key roles and responsibilities:

• In this role I had three core duties; managing the administrative team within Customs Policy directorate, project design and implementation and ownership of the directorate's Freedom of Information (FOI) process.
• As manager of the Admin team I was responsible for ensuring that the essential support service that the team provided was of a high quality and was conducted in a timely manner in a fast paced and time sensitive environment. I was responsible for monitoring the performance of individuals as well as the team's performance as a whole. I conducted quality checks of the work and monitored workloads to ensure resources were utilised most effectively.
• As the projects officer I was responsible for designing and implementing several ad hoc projects as requested by senior stakeholders in the directorate. These included organising and providing Office 365 training for colleagues across the directorate and leading and overseeing a review of over 30,000 Binding Tariff Instruction case records in line with the department's data retention policy. Both of these projects required collaboration with managers from multiple teams to ensure that they were completed within deadline, with minimal impact to the relevant teams' core work.
• As the owner of the FOI process for the directorate I was responsible for gathering the required information for requests from the relevant information owners, drafting responses and obtaining the required clearance and input from senior stakeholders. I worked with the Information Rights Unit to ensure high quality and compliant responses were issued within the statutory deadline.

Key roles and responsibilities:

• as part of the payment processing team my core responsibility was to process hundreds of payments made by the department each day. These transactions ranged from refunds to individual taxpayers to NHS funding payments worth billions of pounds.
• Due to the highly sensitive and consequential nature of this work, it was essential that I made these payments in a secure and confidential manner. It was imperative that all the necessary transactions were made on the day they were due, and I was required to work at a very fast pace whilst ensuring the transactions were made securely and accurately, using the appropriate banks and funding accounts.
• I was responsible for conducting daily audits of all payments made by the team, performing account reviews to investigate any anomalies or issues in the funding accounts. It was my responsibility to inform my management of any issues and work to resolve them.
• In addition to my usual role I led a project to update the team's IT equipment, ensuring that the new equipment had the required software and was functioning, safely . I also volunteered for job shadowing on several team's across Finance directorate and subsequently was able to provide cover for other roles in the area when required.