Reinvigorating the Paperwork Reduction Act: The 1980 legislation may not have achieved all its framers hoped, but it can be revised and improved for the 21st century.

• Author: Shapiro, Stuart
• Position: REGULATORY REFORM - Cover story

Congress passed the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) in 1980. While the PRA was revised twice in subsequent years, it has not been amended since 1995. Meanwhile, the world has changed considerably. Most obviously, much of what used to be on paper is now online (though in the case of government information collections, there are laggards). Further, the number of areas in which information collections are required has increased. Pre-1995 collections like the Census and IRS 1040 still exist; to those, the government has added mandatory collections from the Department of Homeland Security (created in 2002) and the agencies charged with implementing the 2010 Affordable Care Act, among many others.

Also, since 1995, scholars have taken more seriously both the cumulative burden of regulation and the role that paperwork plays in deterring people from claiming the benefits to which they are entitled. Issues of privacy, confidentiality, and paperwork burden have dimensions that were not even imaginable in 1995.

On the surface, the PRA appears to be a failure. After all, it is called the Paperwork Reduction Act, but the number of hours spent by each citizen every year submitting information to the government or retaining records required by the government has increased by about 20% since 1997. Both the Government Accountability Office and the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) have criticized the PRA's information management provisions, and agencies hoping to collect information have long complained about the PRA's burdensome requirements and argued that it deters them from collecting useful information.

Yet, the situation is more ambiguous than those numbers indicate. Perhaps burdens would have been higher if there had been no PRA. Information collected also provides benefits in terms of regulatory compliance assurance and screening applicants for programmatic aid, so reducing the paperwork burden is not an unambiguous benefit. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the agency charged with enforcing the PRA, has doubtlessly improved hundreds of information collections through its review process. OIRA has also strived to make the review process less burdensome where possible, within the confines of the statute.

But most people who have dealt with the PRA would argue that it could be improved significantly. This article draws on research I have done as both a consultant for ACUS and other work on the reaction of businesses to paperwork, as well as on research by others on the effects of paperwork in other policy areas. In it, I discuss the need to reboot the PRA and examine how the statute could be changed to become more effective. We need a Paperwork Reduction Act for the 21st century. And a well-constructed PRA could garner bipartisan support in Washington by focusing on the burdens imposed not just on businesses, but also on individuals and on the need for improved information management within the federal government.

THE PRA AND ACUS REPORTS ON REFORM

The PRA passed overwhelmingly in the House and unanimously in the Senate, and was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on December 11, 1980. While the bill contained provisions on information management, government dissemination of information, and maximizing the usefulness of information provided to the government, Carter's signing statement made no mistake about the primary purpose of the act:

This legislation, which is known as the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980, is the latest and one of the most important steps that we have taken to eliminate wasteful and unnecessary Federal paperwork and also to eliminate unnecessary Federal regulations.... This legislation is another important step in our efforts to trim waste from the Federal Government and to see to it that the Government operates more efficiently for all our citizens. Congress has amended the PRA twice since it was enacted. The first time was in 1986, amid much controversy over the role of OIRA in implementing the PRA. President Ronald Reagan had given OIRA authority over regulatory review in Executive Order 12291. This thrust the agency into the national spotlight and the center of political controversy. The 1986 amendments made OIRA's administrator subject to confirmation by the Senate (a key demand of opponents of OIRA's regulatory review function), emphasized information resource management as a goal of the act, and set paperwork reduction goals.

The 1995 amendments took place amid the flurry of regulatory reform efforts undertaken by the 104th Congress. According to Jeffrey Lubbers, those amendments are better described as an "entire recodification" of the act. They increased the scope of OIRA's oversight to include dissemination of information, maintenance of archives, acquisition of information technology, and numerous other functions, while maintaining the agency's authority over information collection and setting revised goals for paperwork reduction. They also required that each agency establish an office, independent from program responsibilities, to conduct information collection clearance activities.

The PRA has remained unchanged since 1995. The process for securing an approval for an information collection from OIRA is also largely unchanged. If an agency wants to collect information from 10 or more people, it must undertake the following steps:

* Develop the information collection and supporting documentation. The supporting information consists of responses to 18 questions (or 23 in the case of information to be used for statistical purposes) about the burden of the collection and how the information will be used, maintained, and disposed of.

* Publish a notice in the Federal Register and allow the public up to 60 days to submit comments to the agency on the information collection.

* Submit the collection and supporting material to OIRA, including any responses to comments received.

* Simultaneous with submission to OIRA, publish a second Federal Register notice with a request to submit comments to OIRA within 30 days. (These last three bullets are statutory requirements.)

OIRA then has 60 days from submission (or 30 days from the close of the second comment period) to approve or disapprove the collection. It may approve the collection for up to three years, after which the requesting agency must repeat the process if it wants to continue...