Watchdog group questions report on information quality

A government watchdog group on Monday called for an independent assessment of whether rules meant to improve the accuracy of information that federal agencies share with the public are too burdensome.

The rules, published by the Office of Management and Budget to implement part of a fiscal 2001 appropriations package known as the Information Quality Act, require agencies to regularly report on the number of requests for corrections to public information, and steps taken to address the complaints. Administration officials published a compilation of agencies' fiscal 2003 reports along with an evaluation of progress implementing the law.

But according to OMB Watch, a Washington, D.C.,-based nonprofit organization, the administration's analysis of the fiscal 2003 reports is flawed, bringing into question OMB's ability to assess the impact of the law. The group released a point-by-point critique of OMB's report and claimed that the administration would "fail standards established under [its] own information quality guidelines."

The OMB report is rife with inaccuracies and omits information critical to understanding the law's impact on agencies, the watchdog group argued. "Because OMB authored the Information Quality Act guidance for agencies and oversees the program, it is hard to determine if OMB is fairly evaluating [the act's] implementation," said Sean Moulton and Cheryl Gregory, who wrote the OMB Watch critique.

In response, an OMB official who requested anonymity said the advocacy group's allegations are unfounded. The critique "does not present any new data or analysis about the information quality law. It simply provides an 'OMB Watch' spin on the hard data gathered by OMB."

The OMB report addresses eight alleged misperceptions about the Information Quality Act, that: agencies have been "inundated" with requests for corrections; only industry groups have requested corrections; the law has slowed the regulatory process; the act has made agencies more cautious in releasing information; procedures for asking agencies to reconsider correction requests are unnecessary; the law is designed "primarily" for information used to set federal rules; the act is only designed to handle corrections of numerical data, and academic institutions are regulated by the law.

OMB Watch said the administration attempted to assuage these concerns using faulty information. For instance, White House officials claimed that agencies only received 35 challenges in fiscal 2003, when in fact they received at least 98, OMB Watch said. The group based its evaluation on an analysis of the reports provided by agencies, available in the appendix to the OMB assessment.

But the watchdog group inflated the statistics by including "requests for minor corrections that would have been made of agencies prior to the law, e.g., corrections of names on agency Web sites," the OMB official said. "Thirty-five is a better estimate of the number of scientifically substantive requests triggered by the new law."

Administration officials also reported that the information corrections process had been "used by virtually all segments of society," a claim that is technically accurate but leaves out the important fact that industry groups submitted 72 percent of the requests for corrections, according to OMB Watch.

The advocacy group also criticized OMB for failing to adequately back up its claim that the law hasn't slowed down the regulatory process. Administration officials reported that no "engaged stakeholders" had commented on "any slowdown or delay of the regulatory process." But the OMB Watch researchers said they'd found stakeholders complaining that the process of responding to corrections requests is cumbersome. For instance, a "former high-level career civil servant at the Environmental Protection Agency recently argued that this policy is being used to slow down the work at [the agency], directly affecting regulatory work."

In turn, the OMB official accused the advocacy group of presenting "no evidence" of any regulatory slowdown "causally related" to the Information Quality Act. "Indeed, they do not provide a single example of a good rule that was delayed due to an information quality complaint." The group further misconstrues the law as applying mainly to information affecting the federal rulemaking process, when in fact the "first year of experience demonstrates that most complaints concern information disseminated . . . outside [that process]," the official said.

The watchdog group is seeking a more thorough and accurate evaluation of the law's impact. "It is now time for congressional oversight, which needs to include a General Accounting Office [now called the Government Accountability Office] assessment of the law's implementation and congressional hearings on whether the law needs modification," OMB Watch stated.

The nonprofit requested a GAO "assessment of the law's implementation and congressional hearings on whether the law needs modification."

An independent evaluation will make sense, but "only after several years of experience," the OMB official said. "Many stakeholders and agencies are still learning the new procedures under this law."