• Users upload the document as part of the normal appraisal flow.
• In this case, either the employee or the manager uploads the document.
• It's a MS Word or PDF doc.
• While appraisals seem to me to be manager-employee centric, in some organisations there is central oversight, for example by HR, over the process, and they are the group that want to be able to retrieve the documents.
• In the cases that I'm familiar with, the documents are dealt with off-line and there's no requirement to go back to the appraisal once it's been downloaded.

So there seem to be two things:

• An administrator rather than a manager would need to be able to download the documents, preferably in bulk.
• As a concept in the design of appraisals, HR or someone other than a line manager or manager's manager often needs to supervise appraisals.

giving this a 'bump' reiterating many of Mark's comments.

special mention of "HR wanting to 'bulk download' the attached documents" .

The client-partner has suggested "a zip file with all the referenced attachments" - to which I think I would add 'sub-folders' within the Zip file to contain the Learner's name, and then that Learner's document(s) within their sub-folder.

They are looking at the Embedded report source "Performance Questions Reporting" for this functionality, although, if it were offered in a separate / similar report, I expect they would be happy enough.