[House Hearing, 109 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
ANOTHER YEAR, ANOTHER BILLION HOURS: EVALUATING PAPERWORK EFFORTS IN
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON REGULATORY AFFAIRS
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
JULY 18, 2006
__________
Serial No. 109-256
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/
index.html
http://www.house.gov/reform
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COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
TOM DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
DAN BURTON, Indiana TOM LANTOS, California
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
JOHN L. MICA, Florida PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
CHRIS CANNON, Utah WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee DIANE E. WATSON, California
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland
DARRELL E. ISSA, California LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California
JON C. PORTER, Nevada C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland
KENNY MARCHANT, Texas BRIAN HIGGINS, New York
LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of
PATRICK T. McHENRY, North Carolina Columbia
CHARLES W. DENT, Pennsylvania ------
VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
JEAN SCMIDT, Ohio (Independent)
BRIAN P. BILBRAY, California
David Marin, Staff Director
Lawrence Halloran, Deputy Staff Director
Teresa Austin, Chief Clerk
Phil Barnett, Minority Chief of Staff/Chief Counsel
Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan, Chairman
CHRIS CANNON, Utah STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland
JEAN SCHMIDT, Ohio
Ex Officio
TOM DAVIS, Virginia HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
Ed Schrock, Staff Director
Rosario Palmieri, Deputy Staff Director
Benjamin Chance, Clerk
Karen Lightfoot, Minority Professional Staff Member
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on July 18, 2006.................................... 1
Statement of:
Aitken, Steven D., Acting Administrator, Office of
Information and Regulatory Affairs, Office of Management
and Budget; Beth Tucker, Director, Communications, Liaison
and Disclosure, Small Business/Self-Employed Division,
Internal Revenue Service; and Matthew Berry, Deputy General
Counsel, Federal Communications Commission................. 7
Aitken, Steven D......................................... 7
Berry, Matthew........................................... 36
Tucker, Beth............................................. 19
Koontz, Linda D., Director of Information Management,
Government Accountability Office; Andrew Langer, manager,
Regulatory Policy, National Federation of Independent
Business; and Robert Hayes, president, Medicare Rights
Center..................................................... 56
Hayes, Robert............................................ 114
Koontz, Linda D.......................................... 56
Langer, Andrew........................................... 92
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Aitken, Steven D., Acting Administrator, Office of
Information and Regulatory Affairs, Office of Management
and Budget, prepared statement of.......................... 10
Berry, Matthew, Deputy General Counsel, Federal
Communications Commission, prepared statement of........... 38
Koontz, Linda D., Director of Information Management,
Government Accountability Office, prepared statement of.... 59
Langer, Andrew, manager, Regulatory Policy, National
Federation of Independent Business, prepared statement of.. 95
Miller, Hon. Candice S., a Representative in Congress from
the State of Michigan, prepared statement of............... 3
Tucker, Beth, Director, Communications, Liaison and
Disclosure, Small Business/Self-Employed Division, Internal
Revenue Service, prepared statement of..................... 21
ANOTHER YEAR, ANOTHER BILLION HOURS: EVALUATING PAPERWORK EFFORTS IN
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
----------
TUESDAY, JULY 18, 2006
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:05 p.m., in
room 2203, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Candice S.
Miller (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Miller, Schmidt, Lynch, and
Waxman, ex officio.
Staff present: Ed Schrock, staff director; Rosario
Palmieri, deputy staff director; Benjamin Chance, clerk; Karen
Lightfoot, senior policy advisor and communications director;
Brian Cohen, minority senior investigator and policy advisor;
Alexandra Teitz and Krista Boyd, minority counsels; and Cecelia
Morton, minority office manager.
Mr. Lynch. I'm Stephen Lynch, ranking member here. This is
the season where we have multiple hearings going on at the same
time. It's just the nature of the beast.
I did talk to Chairman Miller a little earlier today, and
she said she'd be along directly.
Right on time.
Mrs. Miller. The subcommittee will come to order. I
appreciate you all being here today. Catch my breath, running
up the stairs here.
I certainly want to welcome everyone, those in the audience
as well, for coming to today's hearing on paperwork reduction
efforts in the Federal Government.
Although we have established a very strong system and
eliminated literally hundreds of millions of hours of
unnecessary paperwork, we have also added billions of hours of
paperwork burden even faster. Since its passage in 1980, we
have increased total governmentwide burden by over 400 percent,
to 8.4 billion hours in fiscal year 2005.
Our record continues to be certainly less than
satisfactory, and in a time of increasing global
competitiveness, the United States must be the best place in
the world to do business and to accomplish that we need to make
sure we're not tolerating collections of information and
burdens on businesses that are unnecessary.
In 1995, we amended the act to include, among other items,
a set of certification requirements to force agencies to do the
tough work of justifying their information collections. These
requirements forced agencies to prove that they were avoiding
duplication of information, that they were reducing burden on
the public small entities, as well as writing their forms in
plain English, a piece of legislation that Ranking Member Lynch
and I have proudly introduced together, and that the
information that they were collecting was really necessary to
their programs.
The GAO has conducted a comprehensive study of agency
certifications and found them wanting. Agencies were missing or
provided partial support for 65 percent of the collections in
GAO's sample. Most agencies are not fulfilling their
requirements for public consultation either.
The watchdog for these agencies is the office that we
created in 1980 within the Office of Management and Budget
known as the Office of Information Regulatory Affairs [OIRA].
OIRA reviews each of these collections and can approve its use
for up to 3 years. The office has also had the responsibility
of coordinating percentage reduction targets between agencies
and reporting annually to Congress on progress toward burden
reduction.
OIRA's annual budget--excuse me, their annual report is the
Information Collection Budget [ICB], of the Federal Government,
which tracks our progress in paperwork reduction. The ICB is
required to contain a summary of accomplishments and planned
initiatives to reduce burden, a list of all violations of the
PRA, a list of any increases in burden, including the authority
for each such collection and a list of agencies that in the
preceding year did not reduce information collection burdens
and recommendations to assist those agencies to reduce their
information collection burdens.
The specific burden reduction targets of the 1995 PRA were
not accomplished. That act required a target for reducing
governmentwide burden by 40 percent between 1996 and 2001. And
if that would have been achieved, total burden would have
measured 4.6 billion hours in 2001 rather than 7.5 billion
hours--I think we have a reference chart attached at some point
that would show that--and we wouldn't stand at 8.5 billion
hours today. Any excessive and unnecessary hours of burden we
impose on individuals and small business owners is less time
they can spending being productive citizens, of growing their
business or spending time with their families.
Opportunities to amend the Paperwork Reduction Act to
enhance our ability to achieve these goals still lie ahead of
us, but working vigorously to implement the current provisions
and accomplish reductions is certainly our obligation.
At this time I'd like to recognize Mr. Lynch for his
opening statement.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Candice S. Miller follows:]
Mr. Lynch. Thank you, Chairman Miller. Welcome all. I want
to thank all of the panelists who are about to appear before us
today for their assistance in helping this committee with its
work.
In spite of all the best efforts and the tough talk about
reducing paperwork, the report that has been assembled by the
minority staff, and that Mr. Waxman and I are releasing today,
shows that the reality is far different than our intentions.
Rather than reducing paperwork since 2000, under this
current administration we have required Americans to spend
about 1 billion more hours each year filling out government
paperwork than they did in the year 2000. So it's not even
close.
The paperwork burden in 2005 was 8.4 billion hours, and it
is expected to rise again this year to a whopping 8.7 billion
hours. That adds up to about 39 hours for every adult living in
the United States.
On the other hand, there have been some, in my opinion,
misguided efforts to roll back some very important
environmental, health and safety protections such as
eliminating the filing requirement under the Toxics Release
Inventory, which companies are required to disclose when they
dump toxic chemicals into the environment. Some folks have
worked at reducing that reporting requirement.
The dynamic will not work, however, because both EPA and
the Department of Labor each only account for about 2 percent,
2 percent of the total paperwork burden, while on the other
hand, my friends at the IRS are responsible for about 76
percent of government paperwork that the American people have
to fill out each year.
Much of the recent increase in paperwork has been driven by
laws proposed by the current administration and passed with the
active support of this current Congress, with the support of a
Republican-led House and Senate, and I would suggest that one
good way to reduce the time spent on paperwork is to make the
requirements easier to understand. And that's where Chairman
Miller and I have tried to work for a plain-language, hopefully
English requirement that agencies should focus on in making the
information they put out clear and understandable.
The 800-pound gorilla out there was the Medicare
prescription drug benefit that added enormous complexity and
enormous burden in terms of the hourly requirement for
complying with that program. It is badly designed, and recently
I just concluded my 16th hearing, town meeting, in my district,
going from town to town to try to explain this program. There
is no end in sight. It's very confusing, and there are
troublesome parts of it with inaccurate information being put
out by various groups, including some of the drug programs that
are sponsoring the benefit. That's costing seniors far too much
time and causing them too much frustration.
One thing is clear: that we have not lived up to our
obligations and our promises to reduce paperwork. Americans,
especially all of the small businesses across the country that
are struggling just to keep their businesses running, deserve
better; and I think that's where the chairman and I are in
total agreement.
Chairman Miller, I do ask unanimous consent to enter into
the hearing record a copy of the report prepared by the
Government Reform Committee minority staff. It's entitled
``Government Paperwork Burdens Have Increased Substantially
Under the Bush Administration.''
Mrs. Miller. Without objection, those will be entered into
the record.
Mr. Lynch. Thank you, Chairman Miller.
Mrs. Miller. OK. As we go to our first panel, if you could
all rise, please, and raise your right hands. Because we are an
oversight committee, it is the practice of the committee to
swear in all of our witnesses.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mrs. Miller. Our first witness this afternoon is Dr. Steven
Aitken. He is Acting Administrator of the Office of Information
Regulatory Affairs at OMB. Prior to assuming his current
position, Mr. Aitken worked as Deputy General Counsel at OMB
and was an Assistant General Counsel at OMB as well. He has
served a total of 17 years at that agency.
Earlier in his career he also served the Department of
Justice in several positions. So we certainly appreciate your
willingness to appear before the panel today and look forward
to your testimony, sir.
STATEMENTS OF STEVEN D. AITKEN, ACTING ADMINISTRATOR, OFFICE OF
INFORMATION AND REGULATORY AFFAIRS, OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND
BUDGET; BETH TUCKER, DIRECTOR, COMMUNICATIONS, LIAISON AND
DISCLOSURE, SMALL BUSINESS/SELF-EMPLOYED DIVISION, INTERNAL
REVENUE SERVICE; AND MATTHEW BERRY, DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL,
FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION
STATEMENT OF STEVEN D. AITKEN
Mr. Aitken. Thank you.
Chairman Miller, Ranking Member Lynch and distinguished
members----
Mr. Lynch. I'm not sure if your mic is on.
Mr. Aitken. Thank you.
Chairman Miller, Ranking Member Lynch and distinguished
members of the subcommittee, I am Steven Aitken, Acting
Administrator of OIRA, an office within the Office of
Management and Budget. Thank you for inviting me to this
hearing today and for giving me the opportunity to testify on
OMB's annual report to Congress under the Paperwork Reduction
Act, which is the Information Collection Budget of the U.S.
Government, and our efforts to reduce paperwork burdens on the
American people.
By way of background, as the chairman noted, I have worked
at OMB for 17 years, most recently serving as Deputy General
Counsel before becoming Acting Administrator at the beginning
of last month. This is my first appearance before the
subcommittee.
The Federal Government should not require or ask the
public, individuals, businesses, organizations, State and local
governments and others to respond to Federal paperwork
requirements that are unnecessary, duplicative or unduly
burdensome. Eliminating unnecessary, duplicative and
unjustified paperwork burdens in existing collections of
information and preventing such burdens in new collections is
one of OIRA's highest priorities.
This year's Information Collection Budget [ICB], presents a
picture of our efforts to balance the Federal Government's need
for information against the burden imposed on the public of
gathering that information. We are making progress in reducing
the paperwork burden on individuals, small businesses and local
and State governments. As the ICB reports, of the 15 Cabinet
departments, 12 achieved net reductions in burden resulting
from discretionary actions in fiscal year 2005. This is up from
10 departments in fiscal year 2004.
I would like to offer two examples that are in the report.
The Internal Revenue Service redesigned the Form 1041, which is
the U.S. income tax return for estates and trusts, to
streamline the requirements and make it easier and quicker to
understand and file. This reduced taxpayer burden by 18.8
million hours.
And the Department of Agriculture collects information to
ensure that multifamily housing applicants meet program
requirements and repay loans. USDA consolidated 13 regulations
into a single regulation to reduce burden, assure quality
housing for residents, and improve customer service and improve
the agency's ability to manage the loan portfolio. This reduced
reporting burden by 1.28 million hours.
Although agencies made significant efforts to reduce
paperwork, the burden overall increased 441 million hours, of
which 419 million, or about 95 percent, were due to the
implementation of important new statutes. The two statutes that
resulted in the largest increases in paperwork burden during
fiscal year 2005 are, first, the Medicare Prescription Drug
Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, which the ICB
reports accounts for an increase in burden of 224 million hours
in fiscal year 2005 and an expected additional 4.7 million
hours in fiscal 2006.
This act established the important new Medicaid benefit of
the new voluntary prescription drug coverage. As of June 11,
2006, 38.2 million Medicare beneficiaries have comprehensive
drug coverage.
The other statute is the CAN-SPAM Act, which accounts for
an increase in burden of 116 million hours. This statute
regulates unsolicited commercial e-mail by requiring every
unsolicited commercial e-mail to include information about how
the recipient can have the sender remove the recipient's e-mail
address from the sender's mailing list. This requirement that
the sender of the e-mail include this disclosure qualifies as a
collection of information under the Paperwork Reduction Act,
and therefore it is counted as burden.
I would like to note that with respect to the Medicare
Modernization Act we have received information this morning
from HHS that suggests that the paperwork burden of this
statute may be, in fact, less than previously estimated and
reported in the ICB. If that is correct, it would be welcome
news. Once we can verify a new estimate, we will communicate it
to the subcommittee immediately.
Of the 441-million-hour total increase during fiscal year
2005, the increase in burden due to actions within agency
discretion was 180,000 hours. However, it is important to take
into account the benefits that are to be derived from each
collection of information or, in the terminology of the
Paperwork Reduction Act, the practical utility of the
collection.
For example, the Federal Communications Commission issued
new regulations on truth in billing in order to make it easier
for the public to understand their telephone bills. This
requirement resulted in an increase in burden on the telephone
companies of 2.6 million hours.
The ICB also documents the successful efforts of OMB and
Federal agencies to sharply reduce agency violations of the
Paperwork Act. As a result of the efforts of OMB and the
agencies, the executive branch has completely eliminated the
considerable backlog of unapproved collections and has
dramatically reduced the incidence of new violations.
The ICB also includes a chapter that describes the new
methodology that the IRS has begun using to estimate reporting
burden on individual taxpayers. The new methodology estimates
taxpayer burden more accurately by taking into account the
remarkable increase in the use of computerized preparing-and-
filing software.
Finally, in my written testimony I provide an update about
OMB's new information system for the Paperwork Reduction Act,
which we are planning to activate next week. This new system
will make it easier for the public and Congress to obtain
information about OMB's review of information collections, and
the system will enable OMB to track more accurately and
efficiently the paperwork burden that is imposed by the Federal
Government.
This concludes my prepared statement. Thank you again for
the opportunity to testify in today's hearing, and I would be
happy to answer any questions you may have.
Mrs. Miller. Thank you very much. Appreciate that.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Aitken follows:]
Mrs. Miller. Beth Tucker is our next witness this morning.
She is the Director of Outreach, Communications and Disclosure,
Small Business/Self-Employed Division, at the IRS. In this
position she oversees numerous IRS service-wide programs
including the governmental liaison and disclosure program
office, which is responsible for ensuring the protection of
taxpayer and employee confidentiality.
She began her career as a revenue agent in Dallas and since
then has held a variety of positions in the IRS.
And as my colleague has stated, the IRS is responsible for
about 76 percent of the paperwork we're going to be discussing
here today, so we appreciate very much your willingness to come
before the committee and look forward to your testimony, Ms.
Tucker.
STATEMENT OF BETH TUCKER
Ms. Tucker. Thank you.
Madam Chairman, Ranking Member Lynch and members of the
subcommittee, my name is Beth Tucker; and in addition to being
the Director of Communications, Liaison and Disclosure in the
Small Business/Self-Employed Division of IRS, I am also very
pleased to be the Acting Director of the Office of Taxpayer
Burden Reduction.
The IRS has a firm commitment to impose the least amount of
burden necessary for taxpayers to meet their tax obligations.
The IRS strategic plan is very clear in articulating this
responsibility and making it a goal of each and every IRS
employee. But we face, as you have mentioned, significant
hurdles in our efforts to reduce paperwork requirements and
overall burden on taxpayers.
It probably will not shock you to learn that the first of
these hurdles is the complexity of the Tax Code. We fully
expect that absent fundamental tax reform, the aggregate burden
taxpayers face will, in fact, continue to grow. A cornerstone
of our tax system depends upon each taxpayer's voluntary self-
assessment of their tax liability. However, increasing
complexity hinders every American's efforts to accurately
assess their tax liability and may, in fact, serve as a
disincentive to comply with tax obligations.
The second hurdle we face is the systemic growth every year
as more individuals and businesses file returns.
The third hurdle is, of course, enactment of new
legislation that adds to or modifies existing tax laws.
While new tax legislation often provides many worthwhile
benefits or incentives for taxpayers, the tradeoff is often
additional complexity and increased burden. For example, the
Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act of 2005 provided significant
benefits to taxpayers who desperately needed tax relief in the
hurricane-ravaged region, but it's also required over 230
changes to 78 tax products and two new tax forms.
Each year, all Federal agencies are required to report to
OMB the burden imposed by their paperwork requirement. Our
estimated fiscal year 2006 burden is 6.65 billion hours. This
compares with 6.4 billion in 2005, for an increase of
approximately 251 million hours. Reflected in this increase is
the growth in the number of new forms, as well as changes to
existing forms dictated by 10 different pieces of legislation
enacted in 2005.
Madam Chairman, my written statement offers a detailed
description of many of the steps we're taking to reduce
paperwork and burden on taxpayers. However, I would also like
to update you on a few of our latest accomplishments.
First, we developed a new schedule K-1 for Form 1041, which
is used with estates and trusts. The new form provides
streamlined instructions for beneficiaries and should reduce
approximately 4.27 million hours of burden for over 3.5 million
taxpayers.
Second, on January 1, 2006, we began implementing the Form
944, annual filing of pay program. This change affects 950,000
taxpayers and allowed businesses with a total employment tax
liability of less than $1,000 to file annually rather than
quarterly.
Third, our Office of Taxpayer Burden Reduction led IRS
efforts to create a single automatic 6-month extension, thereby
decreasing the number of extension forms taxpayers must submit.
Madam Chairman, we recognize that a key factor in reducing
burden is communication with our stakeholders. We routinely
seek feedback from a variety of stakeholders including citizen,
practitioner, industry groups and our colleagues in other
government sectors.
As previously mentioned, we have also developed a new way
of estimating taxpayer burden. The new method is based on
taxpayers' reporting of the time they spend and the costs they
incur preparing and filing their income tax returns. According
to the model based on 2004 data, individual taxpayers on
average spend 23.4 hours and $186 gathering information,
preparing and submitting their tax returns.
In conclusion, it is important to know that the operating
philosophy that Commissioner Mark Everson has instilled in the
IRS is that service plus enforcement equals compliance. Nowhere
is that more important than in burden reduction.
We have taken steps both in the area of prefiling of
returns and reducing the burden associated with compliance
actions. We have also attempted to shorten the duration of
compliance activities throughout initiatives such as the
alternative dispute resolution and our compliance assurance
program.
Thank you, Madam Chairman, for the opportunity to appear
today, and I can assure you that burden reduction is everyone's
job at the IRS. I look forward to answering any questions you
may have.
Mrs. Miller. Thank you very much. We appreciate that. Some
very interesting statistics there.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Tucker follows:]
Mrs. Miller. Our next witness is Matthew Berry, Deputy
General Counsel for the Federal Communications Commission. Mr.
Berry has recently served at the Department of Justice as
Counselor to the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of
Legal Policy, and before that he served as the Attorney Advisor
in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. We are
certainly pleased to have Mr. Berry with us today.
And the floor is yours.
STATEMENT OF MATTHEW BERRY
Mr. Berry. Thank you. Madam Chairman, Ranking Member Lynch
and distinguished members of the subcommittee, I appreciate the
opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the FCC's
efforts to reduce the information collection burdens placed by
the Federal Government on the American people.
The Commission is continuously looking for ways to reduce
unnecessary or duplicative paperwork burdens. For example,
since March 2005, the FCC has reduced its number of information
collections by 36. In order to fulfill its statutory
responsibilities, however, the FCC sometimes must impose
information collection requirements.
In recent years, the FCC has instituted such collections to
implement important statutory mandates such as improving
consumers' ability to make sense of their telephone bills,
giving the public the ability to block unwanted telemarketers'
calls and protecting citizens from unwanted commercial faxes.
OMB's fiscal year 2006 information collection budget
indicates that the paperwork burden imposed by Commission
regulations grew from approximately 26 million to 145 million
hours in fiscal year 2005, or an increase of about 456 percent.
The Commission recognizes that this increase is a significant
one; however, the overwhelming majority, over 97 percent,
resulted from the Commission's implementation of recently
enacted statutes. Specifically, information collections
associated with the CAN-SPAM Act accounted for most, or 115
million hours, of this increase.
Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act to address unwanted
electronic messages being sent by some businesses, and Congress
specifically directed the FCC to deal with commercial messages
that are sent directly to an e-mail address for delivery to a
subscriber's wireless device.
In deciding how best to fulfill its congressional mandate,
the FCC chose the option that it concluded would be both the
most effective in protecting citizens from receiving unwanted
commercial messages on their wireless devices and would create
the least amount of paperwork for business.
Consistent with Congress' direction, the Commission
prohibited businesses and others from sending mobile service
commercial messages absent the recipients' express prior
authorization. In addition, because of the need for senders of
these messages to distinguish between e-mail addresses
associated with wireless devices and other e-mail addresses,
the FCC created a list of Internet domain names associated with
commercial mobile services.
Those sending commercial messages are required to regularly
check that list and ensure that they do not send unsolicited
messages to e-mail addresses using the domain names on the
Commission's list.
The Commission estimated that over 5 million businesses
would be burdened both by the rule requiring senders of
commercial messages to obtain express prior authorization from
recipients and the requirement to check the Commission's list
of domain names associated with wireless devices.
It is important to note, however, that these rules only
impose a burden on businesses to the extent that they wish to
send unsolicited commercial e-mail messages. If businesses do
not send such messages, the Commission's regulations impose no
paperwork burden on them whatsoever.
Moreover, the FCC realizes that the estimate of the burden
hours associated with our CAN-SPAM regulations may be far too
high because we may have significantly overstated the number of
businesses that would be burdened. In some situations,
estimating the paperwork burden associated with information
collections is more art than science. Here, the FCC made its
best estimates based on available information and guidance
provide by OMB. When the FCC seeks renewal of its CAN-SPAM
information collections, it will use a new and more informed
burden estimate, which should be significantly lower than 115
million hours.
I also would like to briefly discuss one other new
Commission rulemaking triggered by congressional action that
resulted in a significant increase in our overall information
collection burden. Three months ago the FCC adopted rules
implementing the Junk Fax Prevention Act of 2005. Consistent
with the statute, the Commission's rules require those sending
unsolicited advertisements to fax machines to provide notice
and contact information to allow recipients to opt out of
receiving unwanted facsimiles, and our rules that businesses
honor such opt-out requests.
I note that while the FCC's initial burden estimate for
these information collections, as reflected in the Information
Collection Budget, was almost 25 million hours annually, our
final submission to OMB revised that estimate downwards to just
over 13 million hours, or 12 million hours less.
I would like to close by sharing with the members of the
subcommittee that the FCC takes its duties and responsibilities
under the Paperwork Reduction Act very seriously. By
eliminating unnecessary information collections and carefully
crafting new information collections, we seek to minimize the
burdens placed on businesses and the general public.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today,
and I would be pleased to answer any questions you may have.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Berry follows:]
Mrs. Miller. Thank you, Mr. Berry. I appreciate that. Since
you just finished, I think I'll start my questioning right with
you.
I was trying to take some notes when you were talking about
how you were estimating the burden for the CAN-SPAM Act, and I
guess--you mentioned perhaps it might be too high of an
estimate and that you used OMB best information available to
try to interpolate what all of that meant.
Could you just try to educate me on how you actually do the
construct of trying to understand what the burden requirement
actually is? What kind of information did OMB give you? How do
you make such an estimate?
As an addendum to that, as well, if you are going to revise
your estimate, this committee would be very interested to hear
and to have that information when you do revise that estimate.
Mr. Berry. First of all, we would happily provide you any
revised estimate we have, and we do believe there will be a
revision.
With respect to how we came up with the number, I would
first say that the Commission information collections generally
impact those entities in the communications business; and we
have a much better understanding of those businesses and
compliance burdens on those businesses than we do on all small
businesses in America, which is what the CAN-SPAM regulations
potentially impact.
But we started with a number that we believe we got from
the Small Business Administration of 22.6 million businesses in
the United States. We then had to figure out what percentage of
those businesses would be impacted by our regulations.
This was the most difficult call we had to make, and to be
honest, we did not really have good information with respect to
how many businesses in the United States would be sending
commercial messages to wireless devices; and the best estimate
that we made, which I think again is probably too high, is that
about one-quarter of them, or 5.6 million, would be--seek to
send these messages and comply with our rules. We then took
that number, 5.6 million businesses and estimated that it would
take each business about 10 hours a year to obtain and process
express authorizations from individuals that wanted to receive
the messages.
We then looked at how long it would take a typical business
to comply with our rules by looking at their e-mail list of
people they wanted to send e-mails to and compare it against
the domain name list that we provided that says the domain
names that you can't send e-mail addresses to.
We estimated it would take about 5 hours to set up the
system for them to compare their e-mail list to our domain name
list, and that's a one-time implementation burden; and then
about 6 hours on an annual basis to regularly purge their e-
mail list of e-mail addresses that would appear on our domain
list. And pursuant to our rules, you have to basically do a
purge once every 30 days because once a domain name has been
added to our list for 30 days, the sender is responsible for
not sending unsolicited e-mail messages to it. So that's how we
went about doing the estimate.
I think, in hindsight--and we're going to do an additional
study, but the 5.6 million figure for businesses impacted was
probably significantly high, and I therefore think, and will
share this information with you, that we're going to end up
revising the 115 million hours estimate down.
Mrs. Miller. That's great. Anything that can go down is a
positive trend.
Along those same lines, perhaps I could ask you how an
agency like yours interacts with OIRA as they try to assist you
on burden reduction and estimating and all those kinds of
things. How does that all work out? Do you have any comment on
that?
Mr. Berry. I think we have a very cooperative relationship
with OIRA. I could just walk you through the process that we
follow at the Commission.
Information collections initiate in our substantive bureaus
and offices. This one, for instance, on CAN-SPAM originated in
the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau; they developed
the proposed information collection. And then it goes to our
Office of Managing Director, and they scrutinize it to make
sure it complies with the Paperwork Reduction Act and ensure
there is adequate support.
Once our Office of Managing Director signs off, we will
send it to OIRA to make sure they believe it complies with the
Paperwork Reduction Act. We have to provide a supporting
statement and justification both for estimates and that we have
tried not to have duplicative burdens or to reduce unnecessary
burdens.
At that point, sometimes if we've done our work really
well, OIRA will sign off on it; other times it's a more
interactive process. They'll come back to us with questions,
concerns and the like.
I think generally we have a very cooperative relationship
with them, and I think most of the time it's very smooth
because thankfully we've done our homework and made sure we
comply with the act.
Mrs. Miller. Mr. Aitken, I know that you're new to your
position there, but if I could ask you for your initial
assessment or observation, do you think OIRA has adequate
resources in order for you to be able to accomplish your
mission there? Is there anything you want to share with the
committee in regards to personnel or budgetary kinds of things
or what we can do to assist you?
Mr. Aitken. As you noted, Madam Chairman, I have just been
at OIRA for 6 weeks now, and that's one of the issues I will
look at being Acting Administrator; but now I'm not prepared to
make any statements regarding that issue.
Mrs. Miller. Perhaps a wise way to address that.
I have some additional questions, but I'll wait until the
second round, and at this time recognize Mr. Lynch.
Mr. Lynch. Mr. Aitken, you weren't taking the Fifth, were
you?
Let me start--and thank you, Madam Chair.
In your opening statement, you said Medicare Part D, and
there was a number that was offered, 224 million hours for
Medicare Part D. Now I know there are about 40 million seniors
and handicapped Medicare-eligible folks that would be seeking
to comply with Part D, and it looks--just based on my numbers,
224 million, it would appear that half of that is attributable
to me explaining Part D to my mother-in-law, who is a very
bright woman and has a very good grasp of financial and legal
concepts.
But, seriously, how did you come up with--sort of the
opposite side of the question that the chairman asked Mr.
Berry, how did you come up with this, what did you do to pin it
down do 224 million hours? Because just based on the confusion
that's out there on this, I would have expected the number to
be much higher.
Mr. Aitken. Ranking Member Lynch, before turning to how
that would be estimated, I would just want to make two
clarifications.
Mr. Lynch. You don't have to make it very complicated. Just
how many hours per person.
Mr. Aitken. The lead agency for developing the initial
estimate of burden would be the agency that is engaging, or in
the case when they send a collection to OMB for review and
approval, the proposing agency. So in that case, it would be
HHS and, specifically, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid
Services.
So it's that agency, as is the case with the FCC in the
CAN-SPAM Act, that has the primary responsibility for
developing an estimate, its best estimate, of what the burden
will be based on its experience with operating the program or
its best guess with respect to a new program, on how much that
burden will be for the regulated entities and other members of
the public. So in the case of the Part D program, as in other
collections, it would have been the responsibility of the
proposing agency to develop that estimate.
As I mentioned in my opening statement, we have heard from
HHS this morning that they believe that the estimate may have
been too large for the Part D program, which comprised a large
percentage of the burden for the Medicare Modernization Act. I
believe that according the ICB, Part D was 212 million hours of
the total 224 million hours; and so HHS is currently reviewing
that and they are in the best position to determine what the
appropriate burden would be.
And as the FCC witness explained, when you're implementing
a new program, you don't have a lot of experience to go by, and
so it's necessarily based on estimates and guesses of what the
burden will be. Under the Paperwork Reduction Act, an agency
needs to obtain OMB's renewed approval at least once every 3
years, and during that period an agency will be able to develop
better estimates based on experience and also from input from
the public during that time.
Mr. Lynch. So in terms of my question, how did you come up
with 224 million? You're saying HHS came up with that and
you're just repeating that number?
Mr. Aitken. HHS came up with that number. They then
submitted it to OMB, along with its submission package, for our
review and approval--and I'm not intimately familiar with the
details of the package that HHS sent to us, and then our review
of the package, but typically it's the agency that's proposing
the collection.
Mr. Lynch. I understand. You said that already. I'm just
asking you about your ability to vouch for the number, I guess.
Mr. Aitken. Our number is based on the HHS number.
Mr. Lynch. That's fair enough.
Let me just ask Mr. Berry a followup on the chairman's
question.
The CAN-SPAM Act, do we have any best practices out there
that you could look at? It would seem to me that this would be
something that software could be enormously helpful with,
right; once that roster or that list is established, that it
could just be a matter of a function that eliminates any of
those, rather than anything that's very, very time-consuming
for any individual.
I understand the burden that's been estimated here, but
also there is another burden that we all go through, which is
to delete all that spam; that's the other side of this. So if
you're not doing that, if you're not having a small group of
people doing what you're requiring them to do under the act,
you get a whole lot of us out there, clicking away, trying to
delete all that spam, and that would just make you crazy after
a little while.
But are there some prospective mechanisms or some ideas for
down the road where we could greatly reduce that and maybe have
that whole system automated so that we don't have so much labor
for our small businesses, especially those that are engaged in
that type of activity?
Mr. Berry. First of all, Ranking Member Lynch, I think that
you point out an important thing that I mentioned in my written
testimony, which is, the unwanted messages that go to wireless
devices with respect to both businesses' and individuals'
wireless devices do, in many cases, impose real costs both in
terms of time and expense on those businesses and individuals.
So that burden is reduced by the CAN-SPAM Act.
But with respect to your specific question, I have been
advised that there are ways through--there's software that can
be use that would take an e-mail list and would purge it of
those addresses that use domain names that are on the
Commission's list, so that it can be done. You have to run that
again once every month to be sure you're keeping up with the
domain names on the Commission's list. So technology can be an
important part of the answer here.
Also, we generally find at the Commission that the
compliance burden with respect to information collection goes
down over time as businesses and individuals become more
familiar with the information collection. So I do think the
longer these regulations are in effect, you're just going to
see a natural decline in the hours burden as well.
Mr. Lynch. I will yield back at this point.
Mrs. Miller. OK.
Mr. Aitken, I was listening to and am very interested in
how you actually did the construct, as well, in the Medicare
prescription drug benefit, and what that all meant. And I think
it is difficult. I know that the Congress is hoisting things on
these agencies that do require a lot more burden, paperwork,
etc., not only on the agencies but on the general public as
well.
Sometimes--hopefully, when we do these--it's difficult to
go to seniors that have never had prescription drug benefits,
and now there are over 32 million that do, and say, we really
shouldn't have helped you with your prescription drugs because
it's a lot of paperwork burden on everybody.
So sometimes you have to think about what it is that
government is all about, I suppose. I will just tell you in
regards to also trying to help explain to seniors a brand-new
program for the first time in 40 years, actually, it was great
to have the help of senior advocacy groups and AARP and other
kinds of groups. I don't know if that goes into, again, the
construct of how you try to understand the paperwork reduction
or the burden, additional burden, placed on the beneficiaries
of those kinds of things.
In my congressional district alone we have over 100,000
seniors that have signed up at an average savings on
prescription drugs of about--well, this year, about $100
million. So sometimes we have to look at those kinds of things
as well.
As Mr. Berry was testifying about consumer protection, for
instance, in the event it is more paperwork; but I think it's a
worthwhile thing for government to mandate that people can
understand what their phone bills are actually telling them and
some of those kinds of things.
But could you talk a little bit about--did any of the kinds
of things that were happening out in the field with, as I say,
some of these senior advocacy groups, or AARP, did that go into
the equation, are you aware of that, or how do you actually
measure those kind of things?
Mr. Aitken. Madam Chairman, I'm not aware with respect to
the part D program whether HHS included that within their
development of the burden estimates. We can look into that and
provide that information for the record.
Mrs. Miller. I would be very interested to know that.
Ms. Tucker, as we talked about the IRS, it is interesting,
you hear some of these numbers that the compliance costs for
Americans every year just to fill out their tax forms. I have
heard way over $200 billion, from $225 to $250 billion, who
knows; but I think as a result of those kinds of staggering
numbers and every one of us having personal experience trying
to fill out our own tax forms without the advantage of having a
tax attorney, we do recognize--that, I'm sure, is the impetus
for a lot of debate under the dome here about the flat tax,
fair tax, etc.
But I was interested in one of the things that you
mentioned, and if you could flesh this out a bit for me, about
how you attempted, your agency, to simplify or streamline the
quarterly tax payments for businesses. Obviously the government
wants to get their money as quickly as they can. And I think
you mentioned there were about a thousand businesses that were
advantaged by your new program.
What is the benchmark for a small business not to have to
file quarterly? Just seems like, having come from a small
business background and filling out those forms, what a relief
it would have been, even if we had to only do it twice a year.
Ms. Tucker. Absolutely.
To kind of also reassure you, in our taxpayer burden
reduction program and the stakeholder liaison program that I
manage, we do go out and conduct forums with the small business
communities. And the frequency of touches on forums is one of
the No. 1 things we hear back, make my interaction with you--
why they don't want to interact with IRS. It hurts our feelings
a little bit, but believe it or not, they are looking for less.
Actually, on the 944, the tolerance is $1,000; it actually
applies to 950,000 small business owners. So, in other words,
we looked at what was the cutoff for small businesses that only
had an employment tax reporting of $1,000 or less, and we said,
well, why are they having to go to the trouble of filing four
times a year when we could just annualize that to a one touch.
So we launched that in January 2006; we are in our first
year of operation. We are doing some quality control to see how
it's going, talking our small business taxpayers. But the good
news, I think this one is a good example of how you can not
only reduce burden on the small business, but the reality is,
that also reduces burden on IRS because that's three less
submissions that we're also have having to use our resources
on.
So we'll be glad to share with you after we have our first
full year of operation and then what our next steps are as far
as looking at other opportunities for similar burden reduction
initiatives.
Mrs. Miller. I'm sure the committee would be very, very
interested in having that kind of information.
Does the IRS have the ability to just make those kinds of
decisions? Do you require legislative----
Ms. Tucker. A lot of our burden reduction initiatives we
can do through administrative provision or regulatory, but
obviously a good example--and let me share this one with you,
because I do think at some point we've talked to one of the
committees--we're looking at an initiative right now on office
in the home. That is a form that frustrates and confounds
millions of small business/self-employed taxpayers where you go
through multiple calculations. And that's one where we're
actually looking at, is there a possibility of a standard
deduction to give you the option if you don't want to go
through--almost like, for those of us that are familiar with
Schedule A, you can choose, do you want to itemize your home
mortgage interest or medical expenses, or you can choose the
flat deduction for your filing status.
So on that one, that is one that in talking with Treasury
most likely will require a legislative proposal.
So it really depends. There are literally hundreds of form
and regulatory adjustments we make in any given year without
having to go the legislative route.
Mrs. Miller. Sometimes--well, it's always scary when the
government starts talking about tax reform, tax simplification,
which always ends up being more of a burden; at least that's
the way the trend has always gone. It always seems, I think,
that the customers, the end users of all of these things that
conceptually sound fine here in Washington, but the practical
reality or application of them out in a small business or
individuals and that is sometimes an unintended consequence
from what we were looking for.
Does the IRS have a format where taxpayers can make the
kinds of suggestions that it's always good to hear from them
and then do you actually listen to them? I would be interested
in looking at how you actually get a comment from an individual
taxpayer or small business owner and then what happens to it.
Does it get filed in the circular file?
Ms. Tucker. You would actually be very interested to see a
lot of the suggestions, and in fact, we'd be very pleased to
share those with you.
A lot of taxpayers do correspond with us. We actually have
a form, and I'll be glad to provide it to you, it's Form
13285A, a very scientific sounding form, but basically that's
what we use for taxpayers or small businesses, or even industry
groups can write their suggestion down and send it to IRS.
Two months ago we did issue an updated release that went
out through all of our distribution networks, talking about how
serious IRS is about burden reduction and asking our
stakeholders and taxpayers to give us their ideas. Currently
the process we use, members of my staff do the initial vetting
and then we assign those out to the different functions within
IRS to give us feedback and suggestions.
Of course, the most popular burden reduction suggestion we
are getting from taxpayers is, I'd just as soon not pay any
taxes; but I think you would probably agree, that one is a
little difficult for our agency to administer.
Mrs. Miller. Thank you very much.
Mr. Lynch.
Mr. Lynch. Thank you.
Ms. Tucker, just following up, there were numbers in one of
the reports I read, it might have been the one that you
provided, that did give an estimate of the additional burden
that was proximate to the 2005 changes that we did in the AMT.
We modified it a little bit. So it was a number in here about
what those modifications cost us in terms of burden. I accept
those as being fairly accurate.
The question I have, though, what about the encroachment
issue where you have millions more Americans that sort of march
into--they get captured; now they are subject to the AMT. What
is that doing to the burden that you're seeing imposed upon
taxpayers?
Ms. Tucker. Obviously, the AMT calculation in and of itself
generates lots of questions from the taxpayers and, in fact,
the practitioners that are being paid to prepare their returns.
As far as things that IRS is doing, once you are checking
to see, does that apply to you, we have done a couple of
things. This last filing season we did an ATM calculator or
tool on our Web site where you could go in, and it would walk
you through, do you need to continue with the form.
The interesting thing, and I think it was mentioned in the
earlier testimony, we do have more and more taxpayers--not only
individual taxpayers, small business taxpayers--that are using
the commercial software. Even if they are not going to a paid
return preparer, they are loading the software, coming on and
using our free-file process. And that, in and of itself, seems
to be changing the dynamic of return prep and what causes the
burden on the forms because there is that automated calculator
involved.
In fact, an interesting statistic, in 2005, roughly 88
percent of taxpayers and return preparers combined were using
some form of commercial software to do automatic calculations.
Now, to get to your point, that doesn't take the sting out
of owing the tax, but the use of the software we do believe
assists in the computations.
Mr. Lynch. I guess the nature of my question was a little
bit different.
The continual encroachment of the AMT capturing more and
more people each year--and I don't expect you to just spit it
out. If you could get that information to us, I would like to
see what the impact of that is, because obviously we're looking
at giving some relief to the alternative minimum tax, and that
would be one more argument that we could make.
Ms. Tucker. Absolutely. We'd be glad to.
Mr. Lynch. Thank you. I yield back.
Mrs. Miller. Mr. Waxman.
Mr. Waxman. Thank you very much. Madam Chair, I want to
start by noting that in 2004 I asked my staff to examine what
the President had said on paperwork reduction and to compare it
to what actually has happened under his administration.
The resulting report showed that President Bush's rhetoric
about reducing government paperwork was directly at odds with
his actions. Now it's 2 years later; the President is still
talking about reducing government paperwork, and the amount of
time that Americans are spending on government paperwork is
still rising. In fact, we've updated our report and found that
government red tape has exploded over the last 5 years.
The reality is that this year, according to the
administration's own reports, Americans will spend over 1
billion more hours filling out paperwork than when President
Bush took office. The total number of hours that will be spent
this year on completing government paperwork is 8.7 billion.
That's an enormous number. What it means is that the average
American adult will spend almost 40 hours at home and at work
completing government paperwork.
Our report shows the bulk of the paperwork increase is due
to changes in the law that were proposed by this administration
and were passed by Congress. The single biggest factor is the
Medicare prescription drug bill. The new drug program is so
convoluted and complicated that it is adding 10 hours of
government red tape for every person enrolled in the Medicare
drug plan.
These enormous paperwork burdens were totally unnecessary.
When the drug bill was passed, the simplest thing we could have
done would have been to have the Medicare program run the
benefit just as it runs Medicare Part A and Part B. That would
have saved seniors money, saved taxpayers money and greatly
reduced government red tape.
OMB, which is an important part of the Bush administration,
says that the Medicare drug benefit is adding 224 million hours
of paperwork burdens, but I suspect that the government's
official estimate of 224 million hours of paperwork, enormous
though it is, is probably low. OMB assumes the best-case
scenario, not the worst-case that millions of seniors have
experienced.
I would like to ask you, Mr. Aitken from OIRA, to talk a
little bit about your estimates of the increased paperwork
burden caused by the new Medicare drug benefit. Your numbers
show for HHS the total agency-wide paperwork burden was about
277 million hours per year before the Medicare prescription
drug plan went into effect. Your numbers also show that the
drug benefit will add over 229 million hours of paperwork by
the end of this year, with almost all of those hours falling
under HHS.
This means that the drug benefit will nearly double the
total HHS paperwork burden; is that correct?
Mr. Aitken. I would have to review the numbers in terms of
the base, but that is approximately the numbers in terms of the
increase.
Mr. Waxman. It's really truly an astonishing number. That
means that the drug benefit alone is causing more work for
Americans than the rest of the Medicare program, Parts A and B,
the entire Medicaid program and the agencies, like FDA,
combined.
Because of the structure of the benefit, I can think of at
least three different groups who will be hit by the paperwork
burden: first, Medicare beneficiaries, who must take the time
to sift through all the complicated options; second, the
private plans, who must track enrollment and report to the
Medicare program; and third, the Medicare program itself, which
must keep track of the relationship between the plans and the
beneficiaries.
Can you provide me with a sense of how the paperwork burden
is impacting each of these groups, and can you provide us with
any perspective on how Medicare Part D paperwork compares to
the paperwork burden for other parts of Medicare.
If you don't have the answer off the top of your head,
we'll give you an opportunity to provide it for the record. But
do you have anything to add now?
Mr. Aitken. The one thing I would want to clarify, and I
don't know the details in terms of the particular impact, but
that the burden of the 220 million burden increase was largely
a one-time ramp-up establishment of this very big, new program
in the last 40 years. The estimate for fiscal year 2006 is, I
believe, around 5 million, something like that; the ICB has the
numbers. That reflects more once the program is in place, what
are the kinds of annual burdens.
And so in terms of the HHS inventory, that one-time
substantiation increase for fiscal year 2004 will not be
representative of the future years. In fact, it will go down
much more so that it's not such a large increase over the long
run.
Mr. Waxman. We hope that may be the case, but on the other
hand, when next year comes, people start all over again.
They'll look at their plan, see whether their drugs are still
going to be included in that plan, find out that they fell into
the doughnut hole, look for a plan that will help keep them out
of that doughnut hole. And they may well look for plans that
have other drugs that come on during the course of the year.
And the whole premise of the structure of this Medicare
Part D was that people will shop, and if they're going to shop,
that means they are going to have to go through the process of
evaluating the plans. If they don't shop, then it seems to me
that it's a clear renunciation of the whole philosophy, because
I don't see the market, to start with, to hold down drug costs
by comparing plans. But if people give up on comparing plans,
then there is no real argument to make that the competition is
going to pull down costs; and so far, I don't think the
competition has brought down costs at all.
Do you want to comment on that?
Mr. Aitken. Just briefly.
I believe that--and I would need to confirm and get back to
the subcommittee on this--that a significant portion of the
first-year burden in establishing this program fell also on the
plans that provided the insurance to the seniors and that a
substantial portion of that burden would not be continuing
burden, but would be a one-time need to establish systems and
so forth.
Mr. Waxman. Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Mrs. Miller. Thank you. And I appreciate the questions. We
have had several rounds of questions, talked about the Medicare
Part D extensively.
It is interesting to note that premiums for the plan
originally were anticipated to be $37 a month, and now we find,
because of the competition, the average premium is about $24 a
month. So actually the marketplace is working as was
anticipated. It's going to be a fantastic program particularly
for low-income seniors as well.
With that, I'll excuse the first panel. We certainly
appreciate your attendance today and your participation as
well.
We'll take a brief recess while we seat our second panel.
Call the committee back to order. If you could all please
rise, please.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mrs. Miller. Thank you very much. Our first witness this
afternoon--our next witness, I should say, of this panel is a
very frequent visitor to our subcommittee and we welcome her
back again and that's Linda Koontz. She's the Director of
Information Management at GAO. She is responsible for issues
concerning the collection and the dissemination of government
information. She also has lead responsibility for information
technology management issues at various agencies, including
Department of Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development
and the Social Security Administration as well. So Ms. Koontz,
we welcome you back to the subcommittee and look forward to
your testimony, ma'am.
STATEMENTS OF LINDA D. KOONTZ, DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION
MANAGEMENT, GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE; ANDREW LANGER,
MANAGER, REGULATORY POLICY, NATIONAL FEDERATION OF INDEPENDENT
BUSINESS; AND ROBERT HAYES, PRESIDENT, MEDICARE RIGHTS CENTER
STATEMENT OF LINDA D. KOONTZ
Ms. Koontz. Thank you, Madam Chairman, and members of the
subcommittee. Thank you for inviting me here today to
participate in the subcommittee's hearings on evaluating
paperwork reduction efforts in the Federal Government.
As you know, in its annual report on implementation of the
Paperwork Reduction Act, OMB reports that paperwork burden grew
in fiscal 2005 and is expected to increase further in 2006.
According to the estimates that OMB collected, the total burden
imposed by Federal information collections increased by 441
million hours for a governmentwide total burden of 8.1 billion.
This is an increase of about 5.5 percent from last year's
total. OMB reports that nearly all this increase, about 95
percent, resulted from the implementation of new laws. The new
law having the greatest impact on burden was the one
establishing voluntary prescription drug coverage under
Medicare. Implementation of that law resulted in about 224
million hours of additional burden. The rest of the increase
came mostly from adjustments to the estimates. Adjustments are
changes, for example, in estimation methods or the size of the
population responding to an information collection, which
result from external factors rather than from deliberate
Federal action. All told, adjustments accounted for a net
increase in the burden of about 19 million hours.
Looking ahead to fiscal year 2006, OMB expects an increase
of about 250 million hours because of the new model for
estimating burden being implemented by the IRS. According to
OMB, this expected rise does not reflect any real changes on
the burden on taxpayers but only in how IRS estimates it. IRS
and OMB believe this new statistical model will improve the
accuracy and transparency of future taxpayer burden estimates.
One means of reducing burden established in the PRA is the
requirement for agency chief information officers to review and
certify information collections to ensure that they impose
minimum burden and produce maximum utility. However, as we
reported in 2005, the CIO reviews were not always rigorous. Our
case study showed that CIOs provide certifications despite
missing or inadequate support from the program offices
sponsoring the collections. Numerous factors have contributed
to these problems, including weaknesses in OMB guidance and a
lack of management support and priority given by the agencies.
In our report we recommended that OMB strengthen its
guidance and the four agencies we reviewed make changes to
their processes. OMB and the agencies have all taken action to
partially address these recommendations, but we believe more
needs to be done to establish the kind of rigorous review
process that the Congress envisioned in drafting the PRA.
At agencies that have given their information collections
increased priority, we have seen promising results. IRS and the
Environmental Protection Agency have set up alternative
processes to specifically focus on reducing burden. These
agencies' missions involve numerous information collections and
they have devoted significant resources to targeted burden
reduction efforts involving extensive outreach to stakeholders.
According to the two agencies, these efforts have led to
significant reductions in paperwork burden on the public. This
is in contrast to the CIO process which in our case studies did
not lead to reduced burden.
I think we all recognize that achieving true burden
reduction is a great challenge for the government. As we have
seen both in this year's PRA report and over the years, the
tendency is for burden to rise unless we take active steps to
reduce it. This is why we believe it's important to look for
new ways to achieve the goals of the PRA.
In our 2005 report we suggested that Congress consider
mandating pilot projects to target some collections for
rigorous analysis along the IRS and EPA approaches. I will
note, however, while these targeted approaches appear
promising, they cannot be considered an easy or quick fix. Such
an approach would likely be more resource intensive than the
current process and might not be warranted at all agencies that
do not have the level of paperwork issues that face IRS and
similar agencies.
Further, the experience of EPA and IRS suggests that
success requires top level executive commitment, extensive
involvement and program office staff with appropriate expertise
and aggressive outreach to stakeholders.
Madam Chairman, that conclusion my statement. I would be
happy to answer questions at the appropriate time.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Koontz follows:]
Mrs. Miller. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Our
next witness is someone else that's no stranger to our
committee here, and that is Andrew Langer. He is the manager of
regulatory policy for the NFIB, National Federation of
Independent Business, and his job is to protect the interests
of small business in the face of ever-increasing burden from
the Federal regulatory agencies. And we certainly appreciate
your attendance here this afternoon, Mr. Langer, and the floor
is yours, sir.
STATEMENT OF ANDREW LANGER
Mr. Langer. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair and Ranking
Member Lynch. It's a pleasure to be here once again. It's an
honor, in fact, to be invited to testify before you once again
on the subject of regulatory impacts on small business,
specifically the burden that small businesses face from Federal
paperwork.
I have to tell you, I've been in Washington for over a
decade now, and like most people who have been in D.C. for a
considerable amount of time, I have developed a certain blase
attitude toward certain government reports. But every once in a
while, something comes across my desk that is patently
astonishing, something that simply takes my breath away. And so
it was when I received the information collection budget
several weeks ago from the White House. It, too, is fairly
blase. And in fact, I think government reports have to be
dispassioned no matter what information they have are
conveying, but one cannot be blase about the basic facts being
conveyed in this report.
It starts off with a simple enough precept. America's
paperwork burden rose an unremarkable 5\1/2\ percent last year.
Unremarkable, that is, until one realizes just what that is
5\1/2\ percent of. It's 5.5 of 8 billion hours. That's right, 8
billion with a B. 5\1/2\ percent or 1/20 of that, just about 1/
20, is an astonishing 441 million hours. When I see a number
like that, especially on a Friday afternoon, it sits with me
for some time. I give it a lot of thought. And in this
particular instance I pulled out the calculator. You see,
several years ago, NFIB's research foundation did a study on
paperwork, and after surveying small businesses we came to the
conclusion that paperwork costs Americans just around $49 an
hour, about $48.72 I think is the exact number. Some paperwork
costs far more, some costs far less. Obviously it depends on
the length, the complexity, the technical skills involved. But
the average is around $49 an hour. So just looking at the
average cost, just looking at it from the standpoint of these
average costs at a macro level, paperwork cost Americans $410
billion last year. The increase alone was $20 billion.
Now, in my view, dealing with abstract numbers just doesn't
help. Without context, it's hard to gauge numbers meaning. We
can talk about 200 million hours here, you know, 100 million
hours there, but really, let's put them in context, and let's
put the costs in context. It's when we compare them to other
things that we spend money on, we can see just how huge these
numbers are. I had somebody in my office pull some of the
numbers out of the Federal budget, and the results are
startling.
Let's start with the low end of the spectrum, medical
research. AIDS, we recognize that AIDS is an important thing to
be researching, that it's a serious medical threat, serious
health threat. So worthy that the NIH's Office of AIDS Research
had a dedicated budget of $2.9 billion. Again, you know, $410
billion here, $2.9 billion there. What about cancer? The entire
budget of the National Cancer Institute at the National
Institutes of Health pales in comparison to what we spend on
paperwork, a paltry 1.4 percent or only $4 billion. Certainly
though, Americans are spending far more on our most pressing
public policy issue, that being the war on terror. Sure they
are, just not in comparison to what must be our great public
policy issue, making sure we fill out forms for the Federal
Government.
The Department of Homeland Security's spending in 2005 was
$40 billion. Americans spend 10 times more on paperwork. It's
defense in the end that costs more than paperwork but not by
much. DOD spent $475 billion in fiscal year 2005. Sadly, this
is only 15 percent more than Americans spent on paperwork.
A system that hemorrhages resources on paperwork in this
manner is doomed to collapse. One cannot--it cannot perpetuate
itself, and it will eventually run out of steam. And while I
know that some of my colleagues attempt to minimize this
problem, even if we were to agree that the problem is a quarter
of what it is, a system that focuses $100 billion each year on
paperwork is not doing much better.
All the tools I have discussed previously in previous
testimony to this committee are important. Fully funding OIRA,
making sure that the Office of Advocacy remains secure, putting
greater emphasis on reviewing regulations and the paperwork
burden they impose, setting regulations that aren't reviewed,
all of these are essential tools in getting a hand on the
problem.
But one of the things I haven't touched on in the past is
the role that Congress plays. Legislation is driven by
constituent demands and is crafted in a fashion which can
exacerbate this problem. Every time Congress passes a law which
is vague and overly complex, it hands Federal agencies the
tools with which to do much mischief. Vagueness gives us
regulations where a dry land is magically transformed into
navigable waters of the United States. Vagueness changes the
pickup truck used for local landscaping into an interesting
Federal motor carrier. Vagueness turns recycling into toxic
releases. If agencies are given laws with holes big enough,
they will drive trucks through them, holes that they will
backfill with enough paperwork Americans simply cannot undig
themselves.
I'd ask that as you consider how to deal with the agency's
propagation of paperwork that you would also take time to
consider how best to address Congress' role.
I see my time is running out. I would like to reiterate
that what I had said in the past regarding the business
gateway, NFIB still firmly supports this issue, this program.
It's one we agree with our colleagues on the left
wholeheartedly about. We think that it's a great thing. I do
want to caution, however, that technology is not a panacea. We
cannot make technologies mandatory. We have to recognize that
some businesses will not nor will they ever be tech savvy.
In fact, I recently learned that a number of NFIB's members
are Amish, and we know that they are never going to be able to
use computers. So thank you very much. I look forward to taking
questions from the committee.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Langer follows:]
Mrs. Miller. OK. Thank you very much. Our last witness
today is Robert Hayes. He is the president and general counsel
of Medicare Rights Center. Mr. Hayes led the National and New
York Coalitions for the Homeless from 1979 to 1989 and has
practiced law with firms in New York and Maine as well. He is a
MacArthur Foundation fellow and has received honorary degrees
from 10 colleges and universities.
Mr. Hayes, we welcome you to the subcommittee today. We
appreciate your attendance and look forward to your testimony,
sir.
STATEMENT OF ROBERT HAYES
Mr. Hayes. Thank you, Chairwoman Miller. Mr. Lynch, good
afternoon. We at the Medicare Rights Center work each day with
older and disabled Americans to assist and navigate the
Nation's health care system. This year much of our work has
focused on helping men and women, especially the frailest and
poorest people of Medicare, navigate the complex Part D
prescription drug program. We appreciate the opportunity to
share with the subcommittee how the design of this needlessly
complex Federal program causes far worse consequences than
wasteful paperwork, although that it does.
Paperwork reduction in the form of streamlined and
straightforward health assistance programs do a lot more than
save money. They also can save lives. Those of you who were in
Congress back in 2003 know from personal experience that the
Medicare Modernization Act that created the Part D drug benefit
rejected the consumer-friendly model of Medicare that has
served older and disabled Americans so well for the past 40
years. Rather than creating a Medicare drug benefit, the
Congress appropriated massive subsidies to launch a new cottage
industry of for-profit insurance companies that sell what prove
to be for many people incomprehensible benefit packages. The
subsidies spawned a ``wild West'' marketplace. 1,400 different
drug plans, most with varying deductibles, coinsurance,
copayments, pharmacy networks and covered drugs went to work.
1,400 plans went to work, marketing their way to a largely
unprepared consumer base of older and disabled men and women. I
think this committee understands better than most, complex is
bad, and very complex is very bad. I cannot identify a more
complex public benefit program ever enacted by the U.S.
Congress than the Part D prescription drug program.
This committee could spend weeks trying to understand the
multiple layers of regulation, paperwork and bureaucratic
hurdles that this Part D program has triggered. Millions of our
parents and grandparents have been forced to spend those weeks
trying to figure it out, and the estimated Office of Management
and Budget that it takes 30 minutes to fill out a Part D
application is unfortunately both laughable and irrelevant.
Bottom line, even the savviest Medicare consumers have been
confounded by the complexity of this marketplace and by the
inaccurate and conflicting information available from both the
administration and from the drug plans.
Since last fall people with Medicare have been inundated
with marketing materials from drug plans that are at best
incomplete and at worst deceptive. At the request of Members of
Congress, the Government Accountability Office evaluated the
information hotlines operated by both the private drug plans as
well as CMS. The private drug plans got about one out of three
calls right. CMS did better. They only were wrong 33 out of 100
times.
Batting .334 would be good for a baseball player, but it's
disgraceful when you are being paid by American taxpayers to
provide a basic need to older Americans desperately trying to
make the right decision because your heart pills or your
chemotherapy or your diabetes medication depends on it.
The Extra Help Program, this is not a program administered
by CMS but by the Social Security Administration, also needs to
be looked at in terms of its undue complexity and paperwork.
That's the program that is supposed to assist people with very
low incomes, very few assets, be able to avoid some of the
payments or escape the doughnut hole.
Madam Chairman, you mentioned that this program, Part D,
should be a fantastic program for especially older Americans
who are poor, but three out of four Americans who are eligible
to sign up for this Extra Help Program, these are people in
dire need of assistance to help pay for their medicine, have
not signed up. Why? Take a look at the seven-page application
Medicare's most vulnerable men and women have to complete. It's
filled with intimidating questions about bank accounts, life
insurance policies, any kind of support that's again, being
pored over by your neighbors and various living arrangements.
I'd ask any member of this committee, can you tell me what is
the face value of your life insurance program? I can't. But to
qualify for this Extra Help Program, my 94-year-old neighbor
living in a nursing home has to answer that question and do so
accurately under pain of fine and/or imprisonment.
Bureaucratic disentitlement, complex programs that keep
people away from programs that Congress enacts and which folks
desperately need, is not something new to the Medicare Part D
program. Medicare Part D highlights this problem, bureaucratic
disentitlement, but it is nothing new. The Medicare savings
programs which help low-income individuals pay their Medicare
cost sharing have been available for 20 years, but only about
half of eligible very poor older Americans nationwide are
enrolled. Medicaid, now 40 years old, boasts similarly low
enrollment rates.
There are simple fixes to this, and it may not be the
administration that can do them without the support of the
Congress. Thank you.
Mrs. Miller. Thank you very much. I appreciate those
comments. I'm going to start with Ms. Koontz. You have been
involved in this process for a very long time and probably
longer than you would like to think about, I suppose. But I
guess I'd just like to ask you for your honest assessment of
the PRA status, where you think it is, and if you think that it
adequately encourages agencies to really minimize paperwork
reduction. What do you really think of where we are with this
thing now?
Ms. Koontz. I think there's a couple factors with the PRA.
One issue I would talk to are the burden reduction goals that
were in the PRA that went through 2001, it was 10 percent for a
couple of years and 5 percent for a few more years after that
up until 2001. I think it's pretty clear that those kind of
numbers, which seemed rather arbitrary, don't really work in
terms of providing incentives for agencies, and I think what we
were looking for is maybe some--looking at some alternative
ways, as we reported to you in 2005, to reduce burdens, sort of
along the lines of what IRS is doing and what EPA are doing,
and we'd like to see agencies be setting concrete goals for
data reduction and reporting those publicly and then being
accountable for achieving them maybe in a variety of ways.
The current process relies a lot on the CIO review process
within agencies and also on OMB review. And frankly those
processes, they haven't been fully implemented in compliance
with the law for one thing, and they just don't result in
burden reductions.
So I think there's some opportunities to relook at some of
the aspects of PRA and perhaps to improve them perhaps when
it's reauthorized.
Mrs. Miller. Yeah. I was going to ask you what you think
the most important thing that this subcommittee can do as a
result of this hearing today. I mean, I do like to have some
sort of action plan at the end of these various hearings, not
that we just forget about everything that we've heard, but some
of the things that you just mentioned there, are there any
others that you think, and would they require--I don't know,
it's a question for you and my staff, I guess they would
require legislation to enable the agencies to really assist
them in how we can. What is important for this subcommittee to
take away from your testimony today? How we can improve the
PRA?
Ms. Koontz. One of the things is that we did suggest in our
2005 report that Congress perhaps alter the PRA to establish
some pilot projects to look at alternative ways of reducing
burden in the agencies. So that's one thing that can be done
through legislation and that involves some of the other things
I talked about, setting agency targets and the like.
Some of the other things that have been--about a year ago
or 18 months ago, we had a forum on the PRA, looking ahead to
reauthorization and we brought together a number of experts
from both the government and the private sector, and one of the
things that was mentioned in that particular forum that we
haven't--we haven't audited this, but there was a strong
feeling too that perhaps there was a need for OMB to get out of
the retail review process. Right now they're required to review
every single collection that comes through. They had suggested
well, you know, maybe we could have more impact if we were to
concentrate on more significant collections or some kind of
different threshold and that. So that's something I think we've
said in the past that you could consider, but again we haven't
really looked at all the ramifications of that, but it was I
think a responsible suggestion.
Mrs. Miller. Mm-hmm. Yes. I appreciate that, and it's
interesting.
Mr. Langer, you mentioned that you didn't have enough time
in your testimony to talk too much about the business gateway.
I think you said hopefully it was going to be ready in October.
Could you flush that out a little bit for the committee?
Mr. Langer. The business gateway program has been in the
works for some time. I came onboard at NFIB in 2002 and
immediately was invited to a retreat that SBA and some others
have put together that were working on the first iterations of
it. In essence, the idea is down the road, a small business
will be able to go online, type in a few pieces of identifying
information, the industry it's in, number of employees, the
location of the business because obviously regulations
sometimes change depending on locale, and in theory the system
spits out all the regulations that apply to the business, will
hopefully give them very simple, plain English compliance
guides, and will offer up the opportunity to fill out forms
online or at least give them the forms that they need. The
first iteration, it was originally called the business
compliance one-stop, and it was hard to get the agencies, you
know, onboard with that. The second iteration, the business
gateway's a step in the right direction. They're now moving to
the next iteration of the business gateway. I haven't seen it
yet, but it sounds promising from the folks that I've talked
to, and that's supposed to roll out in early October.
I mean, the idea is we have already taken the first step,
which is to get that massive Code of Federal Regulations
translated into little bits and bytes and put onto the
computer, but it's an incredibly cumbersome tool to use, and no
small business is going to use it. It's impossible for a small
business to go online and figure out what it is they need to
comply with by going online with a searchable CFR. Yes, ask a
small business owner what a CFR is, they're not going to know
what you are talking about. The real heavy lifting of it is for
all of the agencies to get involved, review the regulations and
create those simple compliance guides. It's been one of the
problems that we've had continuously with regulatory agencies
across the board, is getting them to do that.
One of the issues that I worked on, you know, in deference
to the ranking minority member, the TRI program was a prime
example where we worked very hard with EPA to get them to
create simplified compliance guides, and there was a great deal
of reluctance to get them to do it. You know, if I could have
gotten a simple, you know, for specifically dealing with the
lead TRI issue, getting a simple reference table of contents
where if you had a question, it will tell you where to go, that
was hard enough. The point is, it will take leadership on the
part of Congress to get agencies onboard fully with this
program. To incentivize the approach they are creating these
simplified compliance guides. Once we get them online, then
those businesses that aren't on computers, the resources are
there already, they already will have been offered. The
business gateway itself just makes it a much more easily
searchable way for them to find those resources, but we
wholeheartedly support it. It's one where, you know--
unfortunately he's not here today, but Robert Schule from OMB,
it's one of those areas where he and I agree wholeheartedly, it
goes a long way because as we talked about with Medicare here
today, it's not--while filling out the forms is time consuming,
it's understanding the questions that are being asked and being
able to sort of ferret out that information where the rubber
hits the road, and we're--you know, to us, it's not necessarily
yes, you know, Medicare's a huge, huge program. But we're also
interested in the myriad of other burdens small businesses face
as well. You know, you might talk about something that might
only represent 1 percent of a small business's burden, but
that's 1 percent. It's certainly better off than we are now.
So----
Mrs. Miller. Absolutely. That is an interesting concept.
You wonder how many small businesses are using technology to
really--I mean, you are talking about sort of a one-stop shop
or something that's really putting all the information together
for them, as opposed to a guy that's going online, he doesn't
even know what information to be asking for. Maybe he's just
downloading forms. I mean, how is that helping him?
Mr. Langer. That's one of the issues. EPA put out the next
step in terms of their Small Business Paperwork Reduction Act
requirements. And they have everything you need in one place. I
got the link the other day, and it's a massive webpage, but
it's all there, but it's really hard to search. You can do a--
you know, if you know anything about Internet Explorer, you can
find things that's on there. For instance, I went on looking
for dry cleaners because dry cleaners are small businesses
faced with some of the most cumbersome environmental
regulations that are out there. And you can find it. It's not
easily understandable, but it's all there. It's a good step in
the right direction. As headache inducing as the page looks, it
actually is very helpful.
Mrs. Miller. Just one final question. What do you think is
the--I mean, obviously for a small business, dealing with the
IRS is the biggest part of their burden. That's not inherent to
small business, to everybody. In addition to the IRS, what do
you think small businesses would say is the biggest paperwork
headache that they absolutely have?
Mr. Langer. You can't say--it depends on the----
Mrs. Miller. What do they say?
Mr. Langer. It depends on the business. I mean, we get
calls from members, you know, it can be the forms that are
dealing with the H-2B visa applications 1 week. The last couple
of weeks it's been the FTC's proposed regulations governing
direct sales. Now, NFIB probably doesn't have a position on it,
but I have been hearing from members, it will be a huge
paperwork problem for them. If you want to sell, say, Mary Kay
cosmetics, and you want to buy a kit, you're going to have to
have a waiting period. It will take you longer to get the Mary
Kay kit than it does a handgun in most States, with huge
amounts of paperwork that you have to fill out and that whoever
sells you the kit has to hold onto for years. This is going to
be a huge burden for a lot of folks we hear from a lot of
people out there. A lot of Department of Agriculture programs,
especially for small, unsophisticated farmers, are difficult to
deal with. We are hearing a lot about animal ID these days. But
again, we don't have a position on that. We're just hearing
from members on those things, but for every business, it really
depends on the industry.
Obviously if you're dealing with anything that has to do
with where you're dealing with chemicals on a daily basis or
any sort of a chemical substance, you're going to be dealing
with OSHA and EPA. Chances are if you're transporting anything,
you are going to deal with the Department of Transportation,
and that's another issue, which is this duplication of
regulation and duplication of paperwork where you have three
different agencies that are asking for largely the same
information but in vastly different forms. That's a problem,
and we don't see a lot of cooperation between agencies. There's
supposed to be a cooperation, and there isn't a lot of it. And
I'm not sure where Congress' role is in that. But if there's a
way for Congress to be leaders on that, we'd certainly
appreciate it.
Mrs. Miller. Thank you very much.
Mr. Lynch.
Mr. Lynch. Mr. Hayes, you have been very patient there.
Again, to all the panelists here, I appreciate your willingness
to help the committee with this work. Mr. Hayes, I had asked
earlier Mr. Aitken if he could go over the estimate regarding
Medicare Part D and compliance, and it just seemed to me--first
of all, we had to remember that we're going to spend $800
billion--almost $800 billion in the next 10 years. So apart
from the paperwork burden, there's the $800 billion, and no one
is suggesting that we don't spend money on a drug benefit, but
did it have to be this one? Did it have to be so complicated?
And Mr. Aitken, you know, begged off on the number itself,
saying that it had been provided by HHS. But you know, I've
spent way too much time on this one program trying to explain
it to my constituents to think that number is valid. And I'd
like to get a sense--you're the Executive Director of the
Medicare Rights Center. What do you think about that estimate,
about--I think they're saying a half-hour or something like
that, that was the estimate, a half-hour a person to figure
this thing out and to enroll?
Mr. Hayes. I mean, that has no basis in anything real, Mr.
Lynch. I think Mr. Langer probably put his finger on the issue
that, you know, maybe ultimately filling out an application
form may take 30 minutes for somebody in theory, but it can
take really weeks and weeks and weeks of study, going to
meetings, reading through Web sites, if anyone is to have even
a fair chance to understand which particular application they
want to fill out. So that's really the issue from the consumer
perspective, you really could have--to be honest--an infinite
amount of time and still not be able to have a fair chance in
this marketplace to make an informed choice, and I think that's
what has been so unfair about a market system that the
information is all in the hands of the sellers. The buyers are
pretty much shooting in the dark, and you know, to the state
now that the enrollment period's over for most people, most of
our helping people is to try to explain, this is what you
signed up for, sir. Nobody told me, called to tell us, that
there was a doughnut hole in the plan they sold us. And guess
what, now people are going to pharmacies and finding out that
they have to pay retail prices, which often they can't afford,
for the medicine their doctors prescribed.
Mr. Lynch. All right. Do you have a better number--any way
of, you know----
Mr. Hayes. No. I mean I have plenty of solutions of how to
make this, you know, unfair, inequitable, wasteful system more
efficient, and it's probably called Medicare; that is, go back
to what has worked pretty effectively. But I think--I mean, I
know my organization and every other organization like mine has
grown dramatically this year because there is such a massive
need that's going largely unmet, but we keep trying to do more
and more to help people, and I wish to God that I could go out
of business, at least out of this business, and I wish to God
that the Federal Government would spend more money getting
medicine to people and less money with bus tours trying to
explain this thing to people.
Mr. Lynch. Right. OK. Thank you. I yield back.
Mrs. Miller. OK. We certainly want to thank all the
witnesses for your attendance here today, and we'll look to
continuing to work with you to reduce the paperwork burden for
every American citizen. And with that, I'll adjourn the
meeting. Thank you very much.
[Whereupon, at 3:35 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned,
subject to the call of the Chair.]