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GCN Home > 10/27/03 issue

Spirit—not deadline—of GPEA met

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

The deadline for the Government Paperwork Elimination Act came and went last week with the government falling short of 100 percent compliance.

But agencies are not failing to change the way the government performs transactions, and many officials—from senior administration officials to lawmakers—said they are happy with the rate at which agencies are making services available electronically.

So what percentage of required transactions have gone electronic? The Office of Management and Budget won’t reveal GPEA compliance figures until late this year, after tallying data agencies must submit in December. But estimates run from between 52 percent and 85 percent.

Government and industry experts said the administration’s e-government efforts dovetail with GPEA’s requirements.

“By doing work electronically through e-government, we are fulfilling the spirit of GPEA serendipitously,” said Charles Havekost, leader of the Health and Human Services Department’s Grants.gov project.

He said agencies participating in e-government projects are indirectly helping efforts to comply with GPEA.

OMB expects Grants.gov and the Small Business Administration’s Business Gateway initiative to make more than 4,000 electronic forms available online, which will reduce the number of federal forms by 10 percent. The Business Gateway will let agencies share citizen data online by standardizing and centralizing it. OMB estimated that by next September, the Business Gateway will help the government become 75 percent GPEA-compliant.

An OMB official, who requested anonymity, estimated that agencies put about 59 percent of 7,150 transactions online by the Oct. 21 deadline.

Of the 7,150, roughly 1,500 fall outside the authority of GPEA because they affect fewer than 50,000 people, and another 550 transactions belong to the IRS, which is exempt from GPEA because of the IRS Restructuring Act of 1998. The official said disregarding the IRS and the GPEA-exempt transactions, agency compliance is better than 85 percent.

No fairy tale

“Overall this is a pretty good story,” the official said. “Agencies could’ve done better, but GPEA has not gotten lost in the implementation of e-government. A lot of agencies have put a lot of time, resources and energy into becoming compliant.”

OMB will not receive final agency GPEA numbers until December, when agencies submit their results as part of the E-Government Act of 2002 report.

“Even though the deadline is October, we didn’t want to put any extra reporting burden on the agencies,” the official said, explaining why progress reports are due almost two months after the statutory deadline.

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