When people think of the words "red tape," the federal government immediately springs to mind - and with good reason.
Paperwork imposes a heavy burden on private business and despite a 1980 federal law to supposedly lighten that load, the weight is still staggering.To complete all the paperwork the federal government required of private business last year would take three million employees working eight hours a day for the entire year. That is ridiculous.
President Carter signed the Paperwork Reduction Act into law in 1980 but the promised relief from the avalanche of forms and reports never materialized. Federal agencies have been slow to comply with the law or have flouted it altogether. Asking a bureaucracy to cut down on paper-work is like telling a whale to swim on dry land.
Not only is the federal bureaucracy continuing to strangle private business with paperwork, it further hurts the private sector with fines and punishment for nitpicking mistakes in the endless forms. For example, one firm was fined $5,000 by the Environmental Protection Agency for writing a name on line 18 instead of line 17 of an EPA form.
In another case, the EPA imposed $600,000 in fines and legal fees against a company for failing to fill out a federal form - even though the company had filled out a state form in complying with an identical state law. Similar horror stories abound.
A proposed piece of legislation would strengthen the Paperwork Reduction Act. Despite bipartisan support, the measure has languished in Congress without a single hearing held on the measure by the appropriate committees.
A committee with no direct involvement held a hearing in October, but the Clinton administration said it was not ready to testify, despite the fact that Vice President Al Gore's highly publicized "reinventing government" report had a section devoted to "Cutting Red Tape."
Federal red tape is seriously hurting private business, yet government leaders apparently can't be bothered to do anything about it.