Pending legislation (HR-2840) that would require federal agencies to assess proposed regulations to determine their impact on the privacy of individuals, and that would require agencies issuing rules with a potentially significant impact on individual privacy to ensure that individuals have been given ample opportunity to participate in such rulemakings would have no significant costs on agencies, the Congressional Budget Office has said.
In addition, the bill would require government agencies to notify in writing within 14 days any individual whose personally identifiable information has been unlawfully released by the government. Finally, agencies would have to review existing rules to consider the impact on the privacy of individuals at least every 10 years.
CBO said it expects that only a small percentage of the rules published annually affect the collection, maintenance, use, or disclosure of personally identifiable information, noting that procedures already exist concerning the impact on the privacy of individuals under the Privacy Act of 1974, the Paperwork Reduction Act, the E-Government Act of 2002, and other requirements related to information collected from the public.
