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GAO-01-1024R 1 (2001-07-27)

handle is hein.gao/gaocrptamuc0001 and id is 1 raw text is: SGAO Accountability * Integrity * Reliability 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 According to the Unified Agenda, completed actions include actions or reviews the agency has completed or withdrawn since publishing its last agenda.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 GAO-01-1024R Accuracy of the Unified Agenda

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