U.S. Plans One-Stop for Regulatory Information The federal government plans to create a one-stop website for businesses to find and submit the forms they need to comply with laws and regulations. The Office of Management and Budget says the Business Compliance One Stop, online at www.businesslaw.gov, will focus on reducing the paperwork burden on small businesses. It will be renamed Business Gateway. The action grew out of an interagency task force created last year after Congress passed the Small Business Paperwork Relief Act. OMB said a team led by the Small Business Administration will create a website that will allow businesses to find the forms and information-collection requirements that apply to them and then submit information electronically to the federal government. The goal is to allow businesses to submit information once in a format that can be shared by all agencies. “This administration is listening to the small business community,” said Mark Forman, Administrator for E-Government and Information Technology at OMB. “They’ve said there’s too much red tape, paperwork and time needed to comply with regulations and they want government to pursue the promise of E-Government as a solution. The Business Compliance One-Stop Project is a direct response to these recommendations and we’re committed to making it happen.” OMB set no timetable for completing the project. In a poll by the interagency task force, the largest number of businesses said extra paperwork was the single greatest problem created by government regulation, along with the difficulty of understanding how to comply with regulations and the cost of compliance. In fiscal 2003, OMB estimated that it took businesses and citizens about 8.2 billion hours and $320 billion dollars to collect and submit data to the federal government. The federal government alone has more than 8,000 separate information collection requests authorized by OMB. But the task force said many of those information requests are required by law and cannot be changed except by act of Congress. OMB’s solution relies on technology to allow businesses to submit the necessary forms just once and to allow the information to be distributed throughout the government. But the task force acknowledged that many small firms are still not technology-savvy. Businesslaw.gov was created more than a year ago and now attracts about 270,000 hits each week. It provides nearly 20,000 links to federal and state legal and regulatory information on 39 different topics as well as directions about where to go to complete transactions such as licenses and permits, and a host of information on rulemaking, compliance assistance, and regulatory fairness. “The short-term goal for burden reduction is...to create a central online repository for federal forms for the heavily regulated industry sectors: trucking, mining, food, healthcare, and chemicals,” the task force said in its report. “The long term goal…is to reduce federal paperwork burden for all businesses and provide the ability to complete transactions online.”