GAO-01-1024R Accuracy of the Unified Agenda

United States General Accounting Office

Washington, DC 20548

July 27, 2001

Mr. Ronald C. Kelly

Executive Director

Regulatory Information Service Center

Subject: Accuracy of Information in the Unified Agenda

Dear Mr. Kelly:

At the request of the Ranking Minority Member of the Senate Committee on Small

Business, we are reviewing the implementation of section 212 of the Small Business

Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act in selected agencies. In the course of that

review, we discovered several errors in recent editions of the Unified Agenda of

Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions. The errors generally fell into three

categories: (1) entries that should have appeared in previous editions of the Agenda,

(2) entries that reported the wrong date of regulatory action, and (3) entries that

incorrectly reported the status of rules regarding the Regulatory Flexibility Act of

1980. This letter is intended to call those errors to your attention and to suggest a

way to improve the accuracy of the Agenda.

In our review, we examined entries in the “completed action” sections of the agendas

prepared by the Departments of Commerce and Health and Human Services (HHS),

the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the Securities and Exchange

Commission (SEC) for April and October of 1999 and 2000, and for April 2001.

According to the Unified Agenda, “completed actions” include “actions or reviews the

agency has completed or withdrawn since publishing its last agenda.” Because the

Agendas are published roughly every 6 months, items in the completed action section

should reflect actions that the agencies have taken within the previous 6 months.

However, some of the Agenda entries that we reviewed involved actions completed

more than 6 months before the date of the Agenda. At least14 of the FCC “completed

action” entries had this problem. For example, an FCC entry in the April 1999 edition

of the Agenda (sequence number 4173) indicated that a final rule had been published

in the Federal Register in September 1997—19 months prior to the date of the

Agenda in which the entry appeared. Therefore, this “completed action” did not

involve a rule that had been completed since the agency’s last agenda.

We also discovered that, in some cases, the Unified Agenda provided the wrong dates

on which the rules were published in the Federal Register. At least nine of the SEC

entries that we reviewed had this problem. For example, in the October 1999 edition

of the Agenda (sequence number 4664), the SEC indicated that the final rule for that
2 GAO-01-1024R Accuracy of the Unified Agenda

entry was published on August 20, 1999. However, the rule was actually published on

August 27, 1999. In another entry in the same edition of the Agenda (sequence

number 4667), the SEC said that the final rule was published on April 15, 1999, but the

rule was actually published on April 21, 1999. These errors in the Federal Register

publication dates are confusing to Agenda users and make finding the associated rule

more difficult.

Finally, we discovered that some of the regulatory actions that the agencies indicated

required a regulatory flexibility analysis, in fact, did not require such an analysis. For

example, a Department of Commerce entry in the April 2000 edition of the Agenda

(sequence number 646) indicated that the rule at issue would require a regulatory

flexibility analysis (“Regulatory Flexibility Analysis Required: Yes”). However, the

Federal Register notice for this rule clearly stated that a regulatory flexibility analysis

was not required because the rule was not expected to have a significant economic

impact on a substantial number of small entities. We also found entries in which the

opposite was true. That is, the Agenda indicated that the rule associated with an

entry did not require a regulatory flexibility analysis, but the rule itself indicated that

an analysis was done. These errors in the “Regulatory Flexibility Analysis Required”

field have made our review of agencies’ implementation of section 212 more difficult

and can create a false impression regarding the degree to which agencies are

conducting the analyses.

We recognize that it is the agencies’ responsibility to provide accurate information to

your office for compilation in the Unified Agenda. We also recognize that it is

impossible to produce a document the size of the Unified Agenda with absolutely no

errors, particularly for those parts of the Agenda that reflect forthcoming regulatory

actions. However, the completed action field is intended to reflect actions that have

already been taken. Agencies should be able to reflect those actions accurately so

that users of the Agenda can rely on the document to identify regulatory actions of

interest to them. Therefore, we recommend that you alert the agencies contributing

to the Agenda that some of their entries have been found in error, and that they

should take steps to ensure the accuracy of the information provided for publication

in future editions of the Agenda.

We appreciate your attention to this matter. If you have any questions, please call

Curtis Copeland of my staff at (202) 512-8101.

Sincerely yours,

Victor S. Rezendes

Managing Director

Strategic Issues

(450064)