OMB POLICY STATEMENTS
White House Tallies Hours Spent Filling Out Forms
The effort needed to comply with federal bureaucracy now has a number. According to new government estimates released this week, Americans spent 8.8 billion hours filling out government forms in fiscal 2010. The good news? That's lower than the 9.8 billion hours logged the previous year. The bad news? The drop is mostly due to a change in how federal agencies estimate how long it takes to complete their paperwork. In all, the paperwork burden has increased by around 19% over the past decade, up from 7.4 billion hours in fiscal 2000, the White House Office of Management and Budget said.