Regulatory Flexibility Act

Section 610 of the Regulatory Flexibility Act of 1980 requires federal agencies to develop a plan for the review of their existing rules that will have a "significant economic impact on a substantial number of small entities." The purpose of these reviews is to decide whether the rules should continue unchanged or should be amended or rescinded to minimize their impact on small entities, which include small businesses and small governmental jurisdictions. Agencies are required to provide an annual Federal Register notice of rules they intend to review in the next 12 months. Several agencies have used the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions to publish these notices. This report updates GAO's earlier work on this issue. GAO determines, with regard to the April 1998 and November 1998 editions of the Unified Agenda, (1) how many agencies had no Agenda entries that were characterized as section 610 reviews, whether agencies are interpreting the review requirements consistently, and why some agencies that appeared subject to the requirements had no entries; (2) how many of the section 610 review entries in the Agenda appeared to meet the notification requirements in subsection 610(c); (3) if the section 610 review entries did not appear to meet the statutory requirements, why some agencies' entries were not characterized as section 610 review; and (4) whether any federal agencies had revised their plans for section 610 reviews.

GAO noted that: (1) the April 1998 and November 1998 editions of the Unified Agenda each contained about 4,500 entries that were submitted by 61 federal departments, agencies, and commissions; (2) the April 1998 edition of the Agenda identified 22 entries from 7 agencies as section 610 reviews; (3) the November 1998 edition of the Agenda identified 31 entries from 8 agencies as section 610 reviews; (4) 6 of the more than 50 agencies with no section 610 review entries in either edition of the Agenda indicated in these and 19 previous editions of the Agenda that many of their regulatory actions would have a significant economic impact on a substantial number of small entities (SEISNSE), thereby indicating that the agencies may need to review these rules under section 610; (5) officials in three of these agencies offered different reasons why their agencies had no section 610 review entries in the April or November editions of the Agenda; (6) however, GAO could not determine with certainty whether any of the agencies without section 610 review entries in these editions of the Agenda should have had such entries; (7) also, no data are readily available to identify such rules and agencies differ in their interpretations of the section 610 review requirements; (8) of the 22 entries in the April 1998 Unified Agenda that were characterized as section 610 reviews, only 2 appeared to satisfy all of the public notification requirements of subsection 610(c) of the RFA; (9) of the 31 section 610 review entries in the November 1998 edition of the Agenda, only one appeared to satisfy all of the requirements of subsection 610(c) of the RFA; (10) the entries frequently indicated that the underlying rules would not have a SEISNSE and that the rules had already been reviewed; (11) the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Environmental Protection Agency had the most section 610 review entries in the April 1998 and November 1998 editions of the Unified Agenda; (12) many of their section 610 review entries did not appear to meet the notice requirements of subsection 610(c) because they used the Section 610 Review notation to inform the public about the results of previously conducted reviews, and because of the way in which they interpreted certain entry elements in the Agenda; (13) DOT said it would review all of its rules between 1998 and 2008 to determine whether any rule published within the previous 10 years had a SEISNSE; and (14) for any such rule, DOT said it would then determine whether the impact of the rule could be lessened.

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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