Reviews do little to reduce paperwork burden, GAO finds

Rules that require agency chief information officers to certify information collected from the public do little to minimize the paperwork burden placed on citizens, a Government Accountability Office official testified last week.

Linda Koontz, GAO's director of information management issues, said in testimony before the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs that a series of GAO case studies at four agencies -- the departments of Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development and Labor, and the Internal Revenue Service -- found that CIO review and certification of information collections resulted in no reduction of burdens.

Rather, such reviews were generally "pro forma," and CIOs certified collections despite incomplete or missing information from the office submitting the request, Koontz said.

A 1995 review of the 25-year old Paperwork Reduction Act set a target of reducing governmentwide collection burden estimates by 40 percent between 1996 and 2001. But in 2001 the estimated overall collection burden was 7.5 billion hours, almost 3 billion hours more than the targeted 4.6 billion hour level.

Currently, the Office of Management and Budget estimates the governmentwide paperwork burden at 10.5 billion hours. In 2003, about 80 percent of the total burden was generated by the IRS, according to Koontz's testimony.

Koontz said while the CIO review process seemed to have little impact, targeted efforts at the IRS and Environmental Protection Agency, two agencies with particularly large contributions to the burden, have been successful in achieving reductions.

These efforts, based on outreach to federal data users and public information providers and reliant on top-level agency support and significant resources, yielded laudable results, Koontz said. The IRS reported that its Office of Taxpayer Burden Reduction cut more than 200 million burden hours since 2002; the EPA reported that one initiative will reduce the burden by 350,000 hours and save $22 million annually.

In her testimony, Koontz recommended that OMB issue guidance to agencies on implementing pilot projects such as those under way at the IRS and EPA, using strategies such as information sharing, standardization and data integration.

She said requirements for the publication of two Federal Register notices of information collection activities should be revised, and conveyed concerns from a GAO-convened panel that CIOs have been given responsibility for information collection, since their portfolios tend to focus on information technology issues rather than high-level information policy.

Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich., chairwoman of the subcommittee, said that in considering reauthorization of the Paperwork Reduction Act, legislators should focus on the resources dedicated to OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which performs the final, top-level review of collections and authorizes them for three years at a time. That office has seen budget cuts resulting in staff reductions from 90 full-time equivalent positions in 1980, to 50 FTE positions today, she said.

Subcommittee ranking member Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., stressed the need to balance the burden of information collection with the value of collecting that information. "Agencies should find ways to reduce the burden of filling out paperwork," he said, noting, "The key is to find ways to make reporting easier and less time consuming without sacrificing the quality of the information collected."

Robert Shull, director of regulatory policy for the government watchdog group OMB Watch, urged legislators to consider the role that enhanced use of information technology can play in achieving that goal.

"Reauthorization is an important opportunity to take the PRA into the information age," Shull testified. "The very name -- the Paperwork Reduction Act -- signifies the law's origins in the pre-Internet era."