Original Article Feds assigning 9.5 billion hours of homework for American citizens in paper work U.S. takes new swipe at reducing red tape Jon Kamman The Arizona Republic Mar. 8, 2006 12:00 AM About 9.5billion hours. That's how much time the public is expected to spend this fiscal year providing information to the federal government for anything from an income-tax return to a report of an injury to a whale. In all, the nation will devote the equivalent of nearly 1.1 million years of round-the-clock work to completing the 8,459 forms, reports, applications, questionnaires, surveys and assorted detritus required under federal regulations. "Enough!" Congress cried in 1980, when federal collection of information was consuming a little more than 1 billion hours of the public's time. That year, lawmakers passed and President Carter signed a package of would-be restraints known as the Paperwork Reduction Act. Today, with clear evidence that the act and a major overhaul in 1995 aren't working, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Reform will hear ideas for curbing the seemingly insatiable federal appetite for collecting information. If the annual demand were spread equally among the nation's 298 million people, fulfilling it would consume about 32 hours per man, woman and child. The burden includes time spent figuring out what is requested, gathering data, making calculations if needed and, perhaps easiest, actually filling out forms. Before requesting information from the public, an agency must justify the need, hone the inquiry and win approval from the White House Office of Management and Budget. Reviews are conducted at least every three years. At times, as many as 100 government employees are involved in the process, congressional staff members estimate. Because the work is diffused across scores of agencies, the cost isn't calculable, but it probably is in the vicinity of $40 million a year, staffers say. A major problem identified by auditors last year was that agencies simply weren't taking the issue seriously. "The review has been reduced to a routine administrative process rather than the rigorous analytical process envisioned by Congress," the Government Accountability Office wrote to Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich., the regulatory affairs subcommittee head. Many information demands are eliminated each year, but the budget office reports that the largest reductions occur because agencies revise downward their estimates of how many people must file and how long it takes them to do so. Efforts to cut paperwork are inseparable from the perennial campaign to eliminate many regulations themselves. Andrew Langer, manager of regulatory policy for the National Federation of Independent Businesses and a witness at today's hearing, said he will emphasize the need for "regulations that make sense" and efficient ways of reporting. Even wholesale elimination of relatively obscure reports required by more than 50 agencies and all but one Cabinet department wouldn't put much of a dent in the burden. That's because the Treasury Department, home of the Internal Revenue Service, accounts for 80 percent of the paperwork submitted to the federal government. The IRS maintains a full-time office dedicated to keeping tax forms and instructions as simple as possible, but its efforts are regularly thwarted as Congress passes laws that make tax calculations and reporting increasingly complex. Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan public-interest group based in Washington, D.C., lobbied for tightening the Paperwork Reduction Act in 1995 and still views it as worthwhile, said Thomas Schatz, the organization's president. In condemning undue burden, the public also must recognize the government's legitimate need to collect information, said Sally Katzen, who headed the budget office's regulatory review office under the Clinton administration and is scheduled to testify before the subcommittee. "Any blanket prohibition or limitation would be a big mistake," said Katzen, a visiting professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Goal-setting hasn't worked, however. In 1995, when the paperwork burden had grown to 6.9 billion hours, Congress called for reducing information collection by 30 percent over the following five years. Instead, the burden grew by 7 percent in that time. It since has ballooned by nearly 30 percent. The budget office's projection for 2006 is 10.5 billion hours, but about 1 billion hours represent temporary double-counting and will be subtracted, staffers said. Some growth was unavoidable. The launch of prescription-drug benefits under Medicare, for example, added more than 800 million hours of burden as seniors and providers filled out paperwork, according to the budget office. Paperwork isn't just bureaucratic rigmarole, Katzen emphasized. Part of it is the time it takes for businesses to collect information and publish such notices as the nutritional value of food products or even health warnings on tobacco packages. Assembling materials for training crews to handle toxic waste is another example. The burden hits small businesses especially hard, and laws passed in 2002 to give relief have been slow to make much difference, Langer said. The Small Business Administration calculates that for a business with fewer than 20 employees, the cost of regulatory compliance is about $7,750 per employee per year. How much of that is attributable to fulfilling reporting requirements isn't broken out, but Langer said it remains a major drag on productivity. Langer said one of his appeals in testimony will be for a computerized system consolidating all rules applying to to various kinds of businesses and allow electronic reporting of data. Forms filled out for one agency could be routed to others that need parts of the information, he said. A computer gateway is now in operation at the business .gov Web site, but it is only in its earliest stages, he said. "This is 2006, and we should be able to do this," Langer said. "We've got to get serious about this and have the leadership needed to get it done."