Summary

The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 established the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Office of Management and Budget to provide central agency leadership and oversight of governmentwide efforts to reduce unnecessary paperwork burden and improve the management of information resources. However, by the end of fiscal year 1995, federal agencies' annual paperwork burden-hour estimates had risen from about 1.5 billion hours in 1980 to about 6.9 billion hours. This report assesses how OIRA has implemented selected responsibilities assigned to it by the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, which reaffirmed and expanded OIRA's paperwork reduction responsibilities. GAO examines (1) how OIRA reviews and controls paperwork, (2) OIRA's oversight of federal information resources management activities, and (3) how OIRA keeps Congress abreast of major activities under the act.

GAO noted that: (1) OIRA has taken between 3,000 and 5,000 actions on agencies' information collection requests in each year since the 1995 PRA was enacted; (2) at the same time, 20 to 25 OIRA staff members assigned to this task were responsible for reviewing the substance of about 500 significant rules each year and carrying out other statutory, executive order, and policy responsibilities; (3) although OIRA has provided agencies with some guidance on how they can estimate paperwork burden, the guidance is not very specific; (4) as required by the PRA, OIRA has set both governmentwide and agency-specific burden-reduction goals; (5) however, OIRA officials said they do not believe the act requires that the agencies' burden-reduction goals need to total to the governmentwide goal; (6) also, OIRA established the agencies' goals for fiscal years 1996 and 1997 at nearly the end of each of those years; (7) OIRA has not formally designated any pilot projects under the PRA to test alternative policies and procedures to minimize information collection burden; (8) OIRA officials said that other burden reduction efforts are under way, and pilot projects used to satisfy another statute meet the PRA's requirements; (9) OIRA's annual reports do not provide a central focus on how agencies should use information resources to improve agency and program performance, and they only partially describe agencies' progress in applying IRM to improve their performance and the accomplishment of their missions--elements that the PRA requires in a governmentwide IRM strategic plan; (10) however, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) does not explicitly require agencies' information collection requests and budget submissions to contain all of the elements that the PRA specifically mentions as agencies' general IRM responsibilities; (11) OIRA officials said that they keep Congress and congressional committees fully and currently informed of major activities under the act through their annual reports, the Chief Information Officer Council's strategic plan, and other reports and informational mechanisms; (12) however, OIRA's and other reports do not contain all of the specific information that the act requires; and (13) although the annual reports present the changes in burden-hour estimates from year to year, OIRA has not clearly notified Congress in those reports or elsewhere that the burden reduction goals contemplated in the PRA are unlikely to be met, or that OIRA believes that the sum of the agency-specific goals need not equal the governmentwide goal, or that other PRA-required actions have not been taken.