An increase in the number of hours agencies are burdened by paperwork necessitates a new approach, the Government Accountability Office has said.
The Office of Management and Budget reported recently that the paperwork burden grew in fiscal 2005 by around 5 percent to about 8.4 billion hours and is expected to continue to rise — in large part due to the Medicare prescription drug program as well as changes in estimation methods and in the numbers of respondents to OMB’s surveys.
OMB expects an increase of about 250 million hours in fiscal 2006 due to new model for estimating the paperwork burden being implemented by the IRS, but OMB says the increase is largely a matter of methodology and does not reflect any real increases, according to GAO-06-974T.
