Section 1

Background

Over the years, much concern has been expressed about the amount of time individuals and businesses are asked to spend responding to federal information collection efforts. At the beginning of the 1980's, two major steps were taken in an effort to control the burden of such information collection on the public: the Information Collection Budget process was established, and the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 was passed.

The ICB process was developed by the Office of Management and Budget under President Jimmy Carter in 1979-80 and was first implemented in 1981-82. The process works something like the fiscal budget. Agencies plan their information collection activities for the coming year and add up the resulting "paperwork burden" on the public in "burden hours.""} OMB then reviews the agencies' information collection plans and the burden associated with them and establishes a burden-hour ceiling on each agency, which is intended to set a limit on the collections the agency can carry out.

The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 enhanced OMB's authority over information collections. The act set specific goals for reductions in the ICB for fiscal years 1982 and 1983. Under the act, agencies must submit individual information collections to OMB for approval before they are carried out or when a previous OMB approval has expired. OMB can approve such information collection requests, can disapprove them, or can require changes in the proposed collection prior to approval. Further reduction goals were set for fiscal years 1987-90 in the 1986 Paperwork Reduction Reauthorization Act."

Despite these steps, and despite subsequent reports from OMB of substantial success in reducing paperwork burdens, congressional concern has been expressed recently about a large and apparently rising volume

According to OMB, "The measure of burden includes not only the time required to fill out a form, but also that necessary to read and understand the instructions, and to develop, compile and review the information requested." (Annual Information Collection Budget publication, Office of Management and Budget, Washington, D.C., 1986.)

According to OMB, "Collections of information covered by the Paperwork Reduction Act include
reporting requirements (e.g. report and application forms, schedules, and questionnaires), record-
keeping requirements, disclosure and labelling requirements, and other similar requirements" (anmaal
Information Collection Budget publication, Office of Management and Budget, Washington, DC.,
1988).

The 1980 act requires the director of OMB to set a goal to reduce the existing burden of federal collections of information by 15 percent by the end of fiscal year 1982 and an additional 10 percent by the end of fiscal year 1983.

*The 1986 reauthorization requires the director of OMB to set a goal to reduce the existing burden of federal collections of information by an additional 5 percent in each fiscal year 1987-90.

Section 1
Background

of business paperwork requirements. In this context, we were asked to describe changes in the volume of paperwork burdens, to identify factors contributing to those changes, and to describe changes in the populations affected by information collections and in the reasons for those collections.

Section 2

Data and Methodology

The sources for this fact sheet are OмB's annual Information Collection Budget publications and the Reports Management System, which is an administrative data base on federal information collections maintained by OMB. The paperwork burden data are based on estimates of the paperwork burden of individual information collections developed by the collecting agencies and reviewed by OMB.'

To augment our analyses, we conducted interviews with OMB staff to
clarify questions arising from the examination of data on the Report
Management System and ICB. We also selected 10 cases for further
study. For these 10 cases, we selected the largest five increases and the
largest five decreases in burden observed in the system data in 1985-87
for more detailed examination. We reviewed the system data on the his-
tory of each collection affected, and these data were clarified by inter-
views with OMB staff and an examination of docket files on these
collections. We refer to these in the text as case studies and provide
additional data on them in appendix I. The case study material is narra-
tively presented in the text when information from one or more cases is
important in understanding major changes in burden or when it clarifies
the meaning of aggregated system data. This work was conducted
according to generally accepted government auditing standards.

'The accuracy of current estimates of the burden of information collections is not evaluated in this fact sheet.