Senator BINGAMAN. Okay. That's really all I have, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.

Chairman GLENN. All right. Thank you very much.

Our next witness, Mr. Gerald Yung, Vice President, Government Relations, for Mead Data Central. Mr. Yung, welcome to our hearing this morning, we look forward to your statement.

TESTIMONY OF GERALD E. YUNG, VICE PRESIDENT, GOVERNMENT RELATIONS, MEAD DATA CENTRAL,1 ACCOMPANIED BY KENNETH B. ALLEN, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT FOR GOVERNMENT RELATIONS, INFORMATION INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION

Mr. YUNG. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Bingaman. I am Jerry Yung, Vice President of Government Relations with Mead Data Central. MDC is the publisher of the LEXIS and NEXIS electronic research services, and MDC is a subsidiary of the Mead Corporation, both of which are headquartered in Dayton, Ohio. We have a growing amount of regulatory material in our databases, and so I guess I have to say, like the gentleman from the first panel, that in a lot of ways we also make a business of this type of regulatory material.

Chairman GLENN. Has you business also tripled in the last 10

years.

Mr. YUNG. It has. Our primary materials were cases and statutes, but we have added a lot of regulatory decisions and administrative materials because of popular demand, and it is growing very fast, both in the Federal Government and the states, for that matter.

I am here today to testify on behalf of the Information Industry Association as the co-chairman of IIA's Government Information Policy Committee. Accompanying me is Kenneth B. Allen, IIA's Senior Vice President of Government Relations. We have already submitted a full statement to the Committee and I would like here just to briefly summarize our remarks if I could.

Chairman GLENN. Your entire statement will be included in the record.

Mr. YUNG. Thank you. Our focus is on the information dissemination provisions of S. 1742. IIA is pleased to support this important initiative to establish statutory information dissemination principles for the Federal Government. We commend Senator Bingaman for taking the initiative in moving Congress closer toward writing these principles into law. We also thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding these hearings and giving us the opportunity to participate.

The IIA represents 850 leading companies pursuing business opportunities associated with the creation, distribution and use of such information. The U.S. information industry is one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy and dominates the world information industry, but the industry's most important contribution, we think, is the role it plays in fostering the free and diverse flow of ideas and the right of citizens to create, acquire and use information without fear of Government intervention or control.

IIA is pleased to be here today to support the information dissemination provisions of Senate Bill 1742. These provisions accomplish three very important goals. First, they impose on the Federal Government an affirmative obligation to ensure the widest dissemination of public information, including electronic dissemination of such information.

Second, they set forth clear Congressional objectives to guide those public officials that are responsible for Federal information dissemination activities. And third, they place the final responsibility for information disseminations with each agency, which is important since these decisions must be made within the context of each agency's own particular statutory mandates.

IIA particularly supports the information dissemination provisions of S. 1742 that carefully balance the important roles that the Government and the private sector should play in the dissemination of public information. We support the provision that requires OMB to issue guidelines consistent with the goals and requirements of Congress, and we support the provision that lists the factors specifically that agencies need to consider in determining how to fulfill their information dissemination functions.

These factors include, among other things, considering whether equivalent products or services already exist before duplicating such efforts. We think this list of factors is especially important given the inherent scarcity of taxpayer dollars and the almost limitless possibilities for public information products and services. This type of analysis will help agencies decide on a case-by-case basis the most effective and efficient way to disseminate public information, thereby maximizing the investment of both private and public sources in developing and disseminating information products and services to the public.

We also support the provisions of the bill which require agencies to make public information products and services available to all on a timely and equal basis. And those provisions that require agencies to provide the public with advanced notice when they initiate, terminate, or make major changes to significant public information products and services.

We would also like to propose some additions to S. 1742, if we may. We urge the Committee to add language making explicit information dissemination objectives that in many cases we feel are already implicit in the bill. First, if disseminating information, the agency should ensure that no party, public or private, has the abilty to exercise monopolistic control of such information. By definition monopoly control of information denies the diversity of information sources that are essential to preserving the free flow of ideas.

Practices that diminish competition and diversity and may result in monopolies include proprietary like restrictions on the use of Government produced information, high initial charges for access, subsequent use charges such as royalties, and refusal to allow access in all available formats.

Second, although S. 1742 does require agencies to provide advanced notice to the public of significant actions concerning important public information products and services, it is silent on the

believe that an agency's notice should advise the public of the benefits that the agency intends to achieve by its action, and provide the public with a meaningful opportunity to particpate.

Third, we feel very strongly that user fees for Government information products-that is, the underlying source material-should not exceed the marginal cost of providing copies of that information. Agencies incur the expense of creating information and operating information systems to fulfull statutory and programmatic requirements. Consequently, user fees should not reflect agency overhead or the cost of creating the information system, itself, but should be limited to the actual cost of copying and handling incurred by the agency in making available those requested copies. And finally, the bill should make it clear that Federal agencies should disseminate information in all usable formats that they possess. This is particularly true and particularly important if the Government, itself, provides an electronic information product or service, because public access to the underlying information is necessary to encourage diversity and competition with that Government service.

To conclude, we believe that a few years ago a consensus in support of specific legislation would not have been possible. Today we are pleased to join with other segments of the information community in supporting the information dissemination provisions of S. 1742. We feel it is now time for Congress to enunciate the rules on these issues which are so important to our nation economically, politically, or socially. S. 1742 is an appropriate compromise, and we hope that the goals of this bill remain intact and that no significant changes to the bill are felt to be necessary. We urge favorable action by this Committee and Congress and appreciate the opportunity to present this testimony. Thank you very much.

Chairman GLENN. Thank you very much. In some ways your testimony deals with a very basic problem in S. 1742. The original Paperwork Reduction Act was supposed to prevent a lot of additional paperwork and unnecessary requests for information. Now we are into a slightly different area in overall information management, a field where the information available is expanding by quantum leaps almost weekly, or daily, in some cases.

Should we have a more comprehensive overall policy to manage information, as opposed to just preventing excess paperwork and excess forms going out for everybody to fill out? That is a problem that we have to deal with.

Now, you indicate that you support a strong OMB role and a strong role in information management for OMB. In this legislation that Senator Bingaman has put together, we are sort of heading in the other direction. We are decentralizing. We are saying that there have been abuses at OMB, for political or other purposes, and that OMB has tried to control what happens with the expressed legislative intent created on the Hill by the way OMB has managed the information flow.

Now, you were very favorably disposed toward OMB managing things, yet we are going in the other direction.

Do you favor this legislation then, in that respect?

Mr. YUNG. Yes, we do. There are so many possibilities for infor

ment-in our own particular services, for instance, we have 75 million documents, different documents, and we serve just one particular part of business in organizations.

It is very important that the Congress give guidelines to an agency, and OMB seems to be appropriately situated to be that agency that interprets and assists the individual agencies in deciding how to use the scarce tax dollars to maximum that informa

tion.

We also believe though that the individual agencies should have the final decision, that OMB should be the place where basic policy is brought together and interpreted as directed by Congress, but that the final agency decision should be at that level.

Chairman GLENN. OK. Let me put it a different way. Your business, really, depends to a large extent on this flow of information in providing these services to a lot of people that are the result of the paperwork problem that they have. You are addressing that problem in some respects.

How much in your own business, where you are required to fill out forms and so on in solving other people's problems, does this paperwork problem impact on you? Do you follow the distinction I am making?

Mr. YUNG. I do. I think it is a bigger problem for small businesses than it is for the larger businesses. Though large businesses have an enormous amount of paperwork filings that they have to do, they also have the size and scale that they are better able to do that.

We are in the position of being able to manage that, although some of it does seem duplicative. I also would respond to the comments on some of the forms that were required earlier on the earlier panel, pensions, for example. My own personal opinion there is that some things really should be regulated closely, and may be what is needed is more audit of such funds because they are so important to so many Americans. The problem is not necessarily paperwork, but instead, audit and follow-up to ensure that they are being run correctly.

But paperwork is a burdan to us, no question about it. I have even more sympathy for the very small businesses where it is an almost insurmountable burden.

Chairman GLENN. You made a point of hoping that the costs that would be passed along in the running of your business would only be the costs needed for reproducing whatever the information was, not to include the cost of how that information was initially collected.

We haven't tried to deal with something like that in this legislation, of course, but I think you may be bucking the tide on that. A well-known person in Washington has said, "Read my lips, no new taxes". User fees, of course, are being used as new taxes, whether we call them that or not. That seems to be the trend and we don't try and deal with that directly in this bill. I can understand your concern with it, but I am not sure we want to get into the taxation versus user fee area in this particular piece of legislation. We would be entering a whole new swampy area which is in another Committee's jurisdiction.

Senator BINGAMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The authority that OMB has to manage information and oversee the dissemination of information from the Federal Government is authority that was in the law that has now expired. It will continue in this law that we are proposing, and in that sense we are not in any way trying to downgrade OMB's ability to perform that function. If anything, we are trying to heighten the significance of that responsibility in this legislation.

Is that your understanding of it?

Mr. YUNG. Yes, I think so. Our feeling is that what is being done in this legislation is to focus the guidelines that are necessary, that some of the problems that people have identified have come about because of the lack of those guidelines. Now it is possible to be more specific, and so I believe that the effect of this legislation actually would be to better equip OMB to be able to assist agencies. And so they would actually be better off with this type of guidance. So I see this actually as a strengthening, a capability, and that would be a positive move.

Senator BINGAMAN. Do you have any views on the specific proposal in 3511, Section 108, on establishment of the Federal Information Locator System and the provisions that we have in there? Is that something that you folks have taken a position on?

Mr. YUNG. I would defer on that to Ken, if he has a comment. Mr. ALLEN. Senator, we have not taken a specific position on that, but certainly we would support anything that would eliminate duplication and redundancy in Government information collection requests.

Senator BINGAMAN. Okay. Let me ask about the quality of information that is being collected at the Federal level. In the testimony we heard last summer when we had a couple of hearings on this subject, some witnesses expressed real concerns about the deterioration in the quality of Federal information that was being collected. Is that something that is of concern to your organization? And if so, do you think we are doing what we should be doing to try to address that?

Mr. YUNG. It is not something that my particular company sees, because the type of information that we deal with-case decisions, regulatory and so forth-there is no deterioration in that type of quality. There may be a deterioration in the broader type of information that is often collected. And partly I think if there is it may be because of the lack of clear guidelines that have existed in the past, because this has been an evolving process. Ken may want to add something to that.

Mr. ALLEN. Senator, as we testified earlier when we had the opportunity to appear before your Subcommittee, yes, we are very concerned about the quality of Government information. We believe that diminishing resources, lack of attention by many Federal managers to the value of information has unfortunately resulted in perhaps a multiplicity of information, much of which is of limited value. And we think that the activities of this Committee and the reauthorization of the act and other attention by the Congress is one of the many issues needed to emphasize the importance of im