Paper Chase

The battle against red tape

Among the 4,987 kinds of forms used by the Federal Government is one that is supposed to be sent to city officials after a nuclear attack. It asks how many of their citizens have survived the disaster. Scoffs Florida Democrat Lawton Chiles, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Federal Spending Practices and Open Government: "The implication is that even if nothing else survives a nuclear blast, the bureaucracy will rise from the ashes."

Last week, however, the bureaucracy said there was some good news. The time that Americans spend in filling out forms is actually not increasing, as many people think, but just the opposite. So said the Office of Management and Budget in its first report to Congress on President Carter's effort to cut paper work.

The 141-page OMB report offered some impressive figures. It said that Americans now spend 785 million hours a year filling out federal forms. The paper work annually costs the nation $100 billion--about $500 for every citizen. But, it went on, reductions in Government red tape since January 1977 have done away with enough forms to trim the nation's paper shuffling by 9.9%--a cut of more than 85 million hours, equivalent to, say, a year's work by 50,000 people.

Just how did the OMB arrive at these figures? Director James Mclntyre admitted to the subcommittee that the report was based on a combination of guesswork and the honor system. Said he: "We all have to rely on information from Government agencies." Retorted Chiles: "The IRS has to rely on the information it gets from people too, but the process is greatly helped along because we know it does audits."

And while the Government eliminated 700 forms last year, it added 300 new ones. Warned Republican Congressman Frank Horton of New York: "The forms are like weeds. You cut them down, but they keep growing back."

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