The Paperwork Reduction Act
In 1980 Congress passed the Paperwork Reduction Act. Among it’s purposes was to:
minimize the paperwork burden for individuals, small businesses, educational and nonprofit institutions, Federal contractors, State, local and tribal governments, and other persons resulting from the collection of information by or for the Federal Government.
We learned this week from the Office of Management and Budget that, for fiscal year 2010, it only took 8.8 billion hours to fill out government paperwork. That figure is down from FY2009 when we consumed 9.8 billion hours. That decline seems good until we learn that most of the decline is because federal agencies decided that it really didn’t take you as long to fill out forms as they thought it did.
On the “blame Bush” front, large increases were reported between 2002 and 2005, but much of that increase was the result of the advent of the Medicare Prescription Drug Program…increasing “paperwork” hours by 250 million.
On the “blame Obama” front,
the biggest single-year jump in the past decade came in 2010, when individuals and businesses spent an extra 352 million hours responding to paperwork requests from agencies prompted by new statutory requirements.
As an example,
Last year, employers needed almost 70 million additional hours to claim a new credit for hiring more workers…
I wonder whether it was worth the time it took to even get the credit.
[A]nd restaurants spent 14.5 million hours to display calorie counts for their menus…
By far the largest increase goes to the Securities and Exchange Commission, not because it added more forms, but because it decided that it really took twice as long to fill out the required forms than the SEC originally thought.
But, what the OMB doesn’t tell us is how many man hours the government spent figuring out how many man hours individuals and businesses spent sending paperwork to Washington. I guess that should be added in as well.
Although, at this point, does it really matter?
16 Comments
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The site is not broken.
Really
How many pages was the paperwork reduction act?????
Good question-hahahaha
Well, if you would like to know how many pages in the Paperwork Reduction Act, you must fill out this series of forms, starting with the 1-2-MANY Inquiry form request form.
That particular form can be found on the website of the Department of Redundancy Dept website.
The version that I discovered came to 32 pages.
But, it was obviously not complete because in 1995 another 23 page amendment was required.
Committee of Applied Redundant Procedures….
What happened between 1980 and 1992? Just curious.
Good question. I’ve spent some time on the OMB web site trying to find out, but find nothing to answer your question.? But, then again, my computer skills leave a bit to be desired.? Hopefully, you are more computer literate than I am.? If you can find the answer I, too, would be interested in knowing.
My grocer told me that when he opened 35 years ago in Hartford,he had two(2) necessary licenses “grocery” & “beer”,now he has forty-seven(47),all with a fee attached too.
“Hi, I’m from the government and I’m here to help you!”
Sure.
From the Department of Redundancy Department, no doubt.
Get the government out of my pocket and out of my bedroom!
Sorry SOS, I am not a computer ace either. And cherry picking to make some oblique point is not in the best interest of the discussion .
“Cherry picking” is selecting favorable data out of a known data set and discarding what doesn’t agree with your hypothesis.? SOS informed you that the data just isn’t there or not accessible.? She didn’t cherry pick anything.? Whatever skill she used to gain the reported data should be sufficient to access the data you requested, if it exists.? Apparently, it does not.
Sammy I don’t call it cherry picking I call it going with what you can substantiate.? You asked the question go find the answer.
Well,, frankly, I don’t see the “green” here. Just stop the stupid requests and forms. Let’s get Al Gore on this, since the Global Warming isn’t working out so well.!