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A company runs a transformation exercise. It asked for employees to fill out answers against questions, which are submitted to a portal and assessed by a number of employees and scored. These scores, along with the rationale the assessors recorded, were used to put the employees into various roles in the "new model", as well as some on performance plans where the scores indicated improvement was required.

The company fed back the assessments verbally. They have, at the moment, withheld the scores and rationale/assessor comments from the assessed employees. They have been asked numerous times, and there is some anecdotal evidence that line managers are being asked to refuse such requests.

This is in the UK. What mechanisms exist to allow the employees to gain that data, if any? Can the employees ask for other data, like e-mails written about them or instructions given? It seems like a Subject Access Request or GDPR would help, but despite asking on these specific terms, the employer has refused to provide answers. Who should the request, if this was possible, go to and what would need to be included?

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It sounds like the information can be (and is intended to be) linked to specific named individuals, so it is likely to constitute Personal Data as defined in GDPR. Your point of contact would be the Data Controller appointed by the company who would be able to provide a response that could be used in legal proceedings.

Could you contact the Information Commissioner's Office if the company (or other Data Controller) was unwilling to provide the information held? I'm sure you could, but I'm not sure where it would get you.

I'm not convinced there could be a good outcome to this - the best I can imagine would be the provision of the data, but where would you go from there? If what's intended here is an attempt to argue with the assessments or to make trouble for the company, it would be best avoided.

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    It's a complex issue, and you make a fair point about the outcome. A) I think having access to the accurate assessment and not a verbal interpretation is important for the individual concerned. B) If the process was mismanaged or led to bad outcomes, then it is important to be able to argue and resolve this. C) Whether the company should be held to account and how that might be done is indeed a separate question. Making trouble or arguing in general of course is not productive.
    – Elliot
    Sep 19, 2018 at 23:35

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