The Trucking Industry's Federal Paperwork Burden Should Be Reduced

As part of a review on the paperwork burden imposed on American business by federal agencies, GAO examined the efforts of the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to manage their paperwork requirements affecting the trucking industry.

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) imposes a heavy paperwork burden on the trucking industry. It requires duplicate information and is not using collected data efficiently. In selecting companies for safety inspection, the FHWA Bureau of Motor Carrier Safety investigators generally rely on their own knowledge of motor carrier activities rather than requesting and using available summarized information to identify those companies most needing safety inspections. ICC does not have the controls necessary to ensure that its paperwork requirements are properly prepared and cleared before they are imposed on the public. During the past 6 years, 28 of the 70 currently cleared requirements resubmitted to GAO for approval were either incomplete, contained inadequate justification, or had issues which resulted in conditional clearances; nine other instances were identified where uncleared forms resulted in unauthorized data collection. The ICC commodity statistics report is of little use because it is incomplete, inaccurate, and out of date. As early as 1975, ICC knew that it did not need its quarterly loss and damage report. In 1978, DOT stated that it only needed semiannual rather than quarterly data. In 1978, a task force reviewed the ICC financial and statistical reporting requirements and made recommendations which it estimated would save the Government and businesses millions of dollars. Action was taken on several recommendations, some were disapproved with limited justification, and others were deferred pending possible deregulation of the industry.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director: Arnold P. Jones Team: General Accounting Office: General Government Division Phone: (202) 512-7797