Summary: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), like other federal agencies, collects information from the public. EPA uses this information to help ensure compliance with the agency's regulations, to evaluate the effectiveness of its programs, and to determine eligibility for program benefits. However, EPA's information collection efforts impose a substantial burden on the public, and small businesses contend that they are particularly affected by government paperwork. This report (1) describes the general dimensions of EPA's paperwork requirements and the agency's progress toward reducing the burden that those requirements impose, (2) describes EPA's process for developing paperwork burden-hour estimates for its largest information collections as of September 1998 and gauges the credibility of those estimates, and (3) describes EPA's largest paperwork burden-hour reductions between September 1995 and September 1998 and gauges the credibility of those reductions. GAO also provides information on EPA's Reinventing Environmental Information Initiatives and the agency's new Office of Environmental Information.
