But there is an awful lot of paperwork reduction activity that has nothing to do with substantive review of regulations. And it seems to me, just viewing it as a lay person here, I just don't see a whole lot of attention by OIRA to the reduction of paperwork as distinct from the review of regulations, and the substantive review of regulations.

I can understand all the reasons that the President would like to be able to have substantive review of regulations, but the main goal of the law that was enacted that now has expired was to get at the paperwork problem, and I don't really think OIRA has organized itself well to do that.

I can see the problems that you would have with the legislation we have proposed. You have explained those. But to say that your preference is to keep the present act and really nothing else, doesn't seem to me a very responsible way to deal with the situation.

Ms. DOUGLAS. Senator, my actual comment was that given the legislation as a whole vis-a-vis the current PRA, we would take the current PRA and, effectively, take our chances. I would agree with you, at least from a personal standpoint, not necessarily talking on behalf of the National Federation of Independent Business. I have sat before this Committee on several occasions before, discussing our frustrations with OIRA and their attempts-specifically during the Reagan administration-their attempts, or lack of attempts, to really grasp and do something with the small business paperwork problem.

I would also concede to you that it is very, very difficult for us, as well as them or anyone else, to really get down to the point where you can take specific forms that small business fill out and eliminate or simplify them. In other words, there are some big ones out there that are obvious targets. They have been taken care of years and years ago. There are some slightly more pervasive kinds of situations because small businesses fill out so many different kinds of forms, it is very difficult to grapple with. And I would also agree with you that in many instances during the past administration, the emphasis was most definitely on the regulatory process as opposed to paperwork reduction.

If you review the Committee records, you can see that the last time I appeared before this Committee I gave OIRA a "D" when asked by Senator Danforth to give them a grade strictly on their paperwork reduction efforts for small business.

This may sound a little strange, but without OIRA there, even though they have not done a terrific job, to throw the burden, or throw most of the responsibility on the independent agencies, all of which have a vested interest in collecting as much information as they want or need for their own purposes, and to say that, in essence, those people are going to be in final arbiters, I don't think solves the problem.

I think that you have a basic structure in the Paperwork Reduction Act which has not been sufficiently enforced and has not, frankly, been given strong oversight by Congress, except for a few notable Senators who have been involved in this process for a number of years. But Congress as a whole grapples with the paper

better things. And it requires some sort of consistent oversight and some consistent working with OMB and OIRA to solve the problem. We would very much like to help in that process.

Senator BINGAMAN. I understand what you are saying, I agree with much of it, but my point is that there are not just two options, what we have proposed and the present law. There might be a third option, and that is strengthening the requirements on OIRA to get about the job of dealing with paperwork.

Ms. DOUGLAS. There is, in fact, a third option that was already written down. The gentleman at the end of the table already referred to it. There is a draft that was put together by ARMA that is essentially a very good approach to this problem.

Senator BINGAMAN. Where is that draft? We don't have it.
Ms. DOUGLAS. It has not been entered into the record yet.

Mr. ALLEN. Senator, I would like to submit it, with the Chairman's permission, as part of the written record. It is, essentially, alternative language that we would like to submit to the Committee for consideration.1

Chairman GLENN. Without objection.

Senator BINGAMAN. That would be very handy to have.

Ms. DOUGLAS. I think that there are some real good ideas in conjunction with some of the good ideas in your legislation that would get us a lot farther in the process.

Senator BINGAMAN. All right. We appreciate that. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman GLENN. Thank you. You opted for a longer authorization, not just a 2-year authorization.

Having gotten into this issue with these hearings, I would probably go for a 20-year authorization instead of 2-year one! I don't plan to repeat this every 2 years if we can prevent it! I am only joking; I want the record to show that I am not serious on that. I don't think it should go 20.

How long do you think it should be?

Mr. EIZENSTAT. We think that it should be at least 5 years. The original act in 1980 came up in 1986, I believe, and I think 5 years would be the least one should have, so that you have some stability in the area, and particularly if this is going to be an area where you are going to take an even broader look given the Supreme Court decision. I think we need some stability.

Chairman GLENN. Ms. Douglas, you mentioned the fact that you have 11 million weekly payroll reports just to comply with DavisBacon. I don't know whether the Government needs that kind of information weekly or not either. And, I believe you said in your testimony that 80 percent of your members have 10 or fewer work

ers.

Ms. DOUGLAS. Eighty percent in the construction industry.
Chairman GLENN. In the construction industry? Okay.

From your familiarity with these things, what should be the reproting period on these requirements? Do we require too much too soon too often? In dealing with things like Davis-Bacon, what paperwork requirements give you the most problem with small busi

ness: tax law, labor law, environmental law, health and safety? What forms are the most enerous?

Ms. DOUGLAS. Okay. That's interesting. Taxation paperwork continues to be a problem because there is so much of it, and everyone has to fill it out. That probably, in every survey that we have conducted over the past 10 years, has in a given area been the number one problem. Health and safety is a growing concern but as yet, or at least at this time-it has been a significant concern in the past, it kind of died back a little bit, now it is beginning to come up.

Chairman GLENN. I am talking about paperwork requirements now, not public health and safety concerns.

Ms. DOUGLAS. I understand, not the regulations, the paperwork. Every time the census comes out with any kind of census, either the overall, the census of manufacturers or whatever, we get all kinds of calls. An awful lot of the paperwork that small firms deal with they cannot indicate to us which particular form it is. An awful lot of times they cannot tell us whether it is a Federal form or a state form. There is just so much of it that at this point they are sort of just being inundated. But taxes always seems to be a big

one.

And again, I think that in certain instances the IRS has done a pretty good job of cleaning up their act with regard to certain forms. But again, there is always just so much of it.

Chairman GLENN. What are most onerous for the rest of you? Ms. Henderson, you haven't commented yet.

MS. HENDERSON. Well, I am a Government contractor, and as I think you noted in your legislation, Senator, we are heavily burdened. It is a cumulative effect. It is everything. I think that my company has three to five times as many employees involved in paperwork as a company that does the same amount of volume in the private sector.

I was talking with a friend the other night who runs a company of about $12 million and when my company was that size we had about 5 people working on paperwork. She has one person who is able to do it in the 8 hours. My people are in often at night and on the weekends.

So it is a cumulative layering, duplication of information, the same certifications going on over and over to the same agencies. The same information. As a Government contractor, for instance, we recently won a contract that we have to attach almost an audit trail to each of our invoices.

Chairman GLENN. How much would be duplicative information? That was supposedly one of the advantages of having OMB be the coordinator; they would coordinate requests from different agencies asking for the same thing.

OMB was supposed to be able to do that, but I don't know that that has ever been done. You are saying there is a lot of duplication from one agency or department with another; is that right?

MS. HENDERSON. Even within the same agency. As a Government contractor, they ask for the same information time after time after time. So that, for instance, let's say a cost proposal that you would submit to the same agency that you had already submitted 50

that you have signed. I mean, it seems to me that you can certify once to an agency a year and then report exceptions or changes.

I think those kinds of rational looks at the kind of paperwork that we are faced with, there seems to me to be logical, simple solutions. I have been very impressed with the Office of Federal Procurement under Al Burman's leadership in looking at very practical ways at those kinds of things, but there is a lot of duplication. Mr. ALLEN. Senator, to give you just a brief overview of one subset of the paperwork problem, whether we are dealing with small businesses or large businesses, a member of our association, Donald Scupski, who is both a certified records manager and an attorney, has compiled a work which would provide business owners, private sector personnel, really with an overview of just the Federal recordkeeping requirements. This is just a small subset of the paperwork problem, and here are the two volumes in which he deals with strictly the Federal requirements. There are additional volumes that deal with each individual State.

That's a small subset, and one of his caveats in the purchase of this type of service from him is that he is not sure he has caught them all.

So just in one small subset, if I were a small businessman faced with problems of paperwork and subsequently_recordkeeping problems, this is really what I have to deal with. Fortunately, there is this kind of a tool to work with, but it is a major headache just in the recordkeeping area.

Chairman GLENN. Thank you. Senator Bingaman.

Senator BINGAMAN. I have no other questions, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman GLENN. I think we had better move along here, because we do have other witnesses this morning. We could obviously go on with more detailed questions for all of you. We appreciate you all being here this morning very much. Thank you. It was very helpful.

Our next panel is Dr. J. William Hirzy, President, National Federation of Federal Employees, Local 2050, at the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency.

TESTIMONY OF J. WILLIAM HIRZY, PH.D., PRESIDENT, NATIONAL FEDERATION OF FEDERAL EMPLOYEES, LOCAL 2050 AT THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY,1 ACCOMPANIED BY RUFUS MORRISON, PH.D., SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, LOCAL 2050 Dr. HIRZY. Good morning, Mr. Chairman. With me is Dr. Rufus Morrison, who is Senior Vice President of our local.

Chairman GLENN. Good. Welcome.

Dr. HIRZY. I would also, on a personal note, like to extend my warmest, best wishes to you on the 28th anniversary of one of the happiest and most memorable events of the 1960s in which you were the central player.

Chairman GLENN. It was a couple of days ago. It is getting to be ancient history now.

Dr. HIRZY. Not for some of us.

I'm William Hirzy, and actually President-Elect currently of Local 2050, National Federation of Federal Employees, and we represent the professional staff at EPA headquarters. Many of these employees participate directly or indirectly in the agency's acitivities related to the Paperwork Reduction Act. We appreciate the opportunity to testify on S. 1742 and other activities of the Office of Management and Budget under Executive Orders 1291 and 12498. My oral testimony is principally based on one specific example of how the PRA review process at OMB affected EPA's effectiveness and employee moral, and it offers some recommendations that the union believes will improve both of these things. I have also submitted some written material comprising the union's testimony given last year before Mr. Conyer's and Mr. Sikorski's Committees of the House addressing OBM's review activities also.

In 1987 EPA was engaged in the development of an effluent guideline regulation for the pesticide industry under the Clean Water Act, one element of which was to gather information from the regulated community be means of a survey. EPA designed a survey instrument and submitted it to OMB for review in December of 1987 and published a notice of its submission in the Federal Register inviting public comment.

In the following month EPA and OMB received word that the National Agricultural Chemicals Association, NACA, objected to some aspects of the survey. At this point, which was about 30 days into the review process, OMB informed EPA informally that the new survey would not be cleared until EPA met with NACA to discuss the objections. EPA was taken aback at this development, but moved quickly to resolve the problems by meeting with representatives of NACA and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which had expressed concern about delay in the rulemaking.

EPA held three meetings with industry and NRDC during the remainder of the review period but was unable to get from NACA a clear statement of the industry's objections to the survey, other than some relatively vague statements about the sensitivity of providing certain financial data.

I would point out that this objection is not a valid cause for disapproving a survey under the PRA.

EPA had demonstrated the need for the information in its submission to OMB and had a complete set of procedures to protect confidential business information. Nevertheless, OMB saw fit to dispapprove the economic portion of the survey at the end of the review period, which was in April of '88, stating the EPA had failed to collect the financial data in the least burdensome way and it hadn't demonstrated the pratical utitility of certain financial information.

We saw this rejection of disingenuous since the OMB staff had acknowledged early in the review process, before NACA had contacts, by the say, that the survey in fact was quite well designed. And EPA had also experienced continuing opposition by OMB to the development of effluent guidelines in general. And it seemed like these arguments that OMB was raising about, "burden," and practical utility, were just a convenient way of delaying or weakening the regulation as part of the administration's overall policy of