The fuss over releasing the Iraq cabinet papers has eclipsed another information tribunal ruling, which is perhaps even more significant in what it reveals about official arrogance about the citizen's right to know.

Earlier this month, the tribunal ordered the disclosure of two internal reviews of the government's national identity card scheme. Unlike the Iraq decision, which was a once-in-a-generation controversy, the ID ruling could change the way Whitehall works every day.

It concerns a procedure called Gateway reviews. These are quick, independent and expert sanity checks carried out at crucial stages of programmes and projects deemed to be important and/or risky. It's an excellent idea – which, the Treasury tells us, has saved taxpayers a fortune.

As the government's largest, most complex and sensitive IT-based initiative, the ID programme was subjected to two "Gateway zero" reviews, in 2003 and 2004. These are designed to assess why a programme is needed, what is needed to make it work, and what risks lie ahead. You would have thought that the public interest in knowing all three makes a compelling case for disclosure.

Not so, says the Treasury's Office of Government Commerce (OGC), which operates the Gateway system, and has fought freedom of information act requests every step of the way.

Its main argument is that there is a greater public interest in preserving the Gateway process, which would be imperilled if participants knew their words would be made public. The result would be "bland and anodyne" reports.

With elegance and logic, the tribunal chucks this argument out of the window. In making this decision, it says, the onus is on the OGC to prove a "real and weighty" causal relationship between disclosure and damage.

This it failed to do. In fact, far from the public interest being served by secrecy, "disclosure of the requested information would clearly add to the public's knowledge in this respect and therefore to the public interest which sought to ensure that schemes as complex albeit as sensitive as the ID cards scheme were properly scrutinised and implemented."

Two other claims receive shorter shrift. One is a worry of "adverse press reactions ... if any form of criticism were contained in the report in question". Rightly, the tribunal says that this is none of the OGC's business. Likewise, the OGC's breathtaking claim that the reviews should be kept from citizens because we might find them "uninformative or hard to understand".

The OGC's final act of wriggling was to claim that the disputed information added "nothing" to a debate on the merits of identity cards as a whole. The tribunal said that this view misses the point: "It is not for the tribunal, let alone the OGC or the [information] commissioner, to second-guess the scope and content of the possible public debate."

Too right. The decision was promulgated on 19 February, giving the OGC 28 days to comply. I make that 12 March – though surely only a petulant child would wait until the very last moment. Surely?