Environmental Regulation

Differences Remain Between EPA and OMB Over Paperwork Requirements Gao ID: RCED-94-254 August 23, 1994

In order to reduce the federal paperwork burden on the public, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has been given broad authority over agencies' data collection activities. Agencies must submit requests for information collection to OMB for approval before they are carried out, and periodically thereafter in the case of recurring information collection requests. To further protect the public, agencies are prohibited from penalizing those who fail to maintain or provide requested information if a currently valid OMB control number is not displayed on the agency's information collection request. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently found that most of its 500 information requests had lapses, or periods of time when EPA did not have approval from OMB to collect the request information. Also, about half of its information collection request control numbers were not displayed in the Code of Federal Regulations, as required. This report discusses (1) EPA's problems in managing its information collection request duties and the enforcement fines and penalties affected by these problems and (2) the causes of these problems, including the effect of OMB's oversight on EPA's efforts to collect information.

GAO found that: (1) EPA estimates that it has lost about $2 million in enforcement penalties because it allowed OMB-approved information collection requests to lapse before requesting renewals; (2) EPA believes that poor management and disagreements between EPA and OMB regarding the amount of analysis EPA must produce to get an information collection request renewed has contributed to the increase in lapsed requests; (3) OMB believed that the additional requests for analyses it made to EPA offices were necessary to fulfill its responsibilities under the Paperwork Reduction Act; (4) EPA has developed a status report on information collection requests and OMB is working cooperatively with EPA to rank OMB information collection requests and improve the timeliness of request reviews; (5) no OMB approvals of EPA information collection requests have lapsed since February 1993; and (6) although EPA does not expect that any other of its enforcement actions will be significantly affected by lapses, EPA and OMB need to resolve a number of key issues that continue to cause confusion and delay the information collection request process.

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.

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