The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 (Pub. L. No. 96-511, 94 Stat. 2812, codified at ) is a United States federal law enacted in 1980 designed to reduce the total amount of paperwork burden the federal government imposes on private businesses and citizens. The Act imposes procedural requirements on agencies that wish to collect information from the public. It also established the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and authorized this new agency to oversee federal agencies' collection of information from the public and to establish information policies. A substantial amendment, the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, confirmed that OIRA's authority extended over not only agency orders to provide information to the government, but also agency orders to provide information to the public. Historical context The predecessor statute to the Paperwork Reduction Act was the Federal Reports Act of 1942. That statute required agencies to obtain approval of the Bureau of the Budget (a direct predecessor of OMB) before imposing information collection burdens on the public. However, large departments such as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) were exempted from the requirement, and the statute neglected to include sanctions for agencies' noncompliance. Moreover, OMB chronically understaffed its responsibilities: in 1947, there were 47 personnel reviewing agency requests for the entire government, but by 1973 the number of reviewers had dwindled to 25, and these few reviewers had a number of additional responsibilities. The result of the lack of resources was both weak oversight (only between 1 and 5 percent of applications were rejected) and longer delays. Some agencies refused to submit requests for approval; others sought and received alternative processes, fragmenting the regulatory system and increasing the chance of duplicative and wasteful demands for information. Substantive requirements The Act imposes a number of procedural requirements on an agency that wishes to implement a reporting or recordkeeping requirement on the public. For instance, the agency must determine a specific objective met by the collection of information, develop a plan for use of the information, and in some cases test the collection method through a pilot program. The agency must ensure that forms include certain items, for instance: an explanation to its audience of the purposes of the information collection, an estimate of the paperwork burden, and whether response is voluntary. In most cases, agencies are further required