Monday, July 13, 2009

The Form That Lets You Say, ‘More Forms, Please’ - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com:

Last year, Americans spent nearly 10 billion hours [pdf] filling out more than 8,000 different government forms and other official requests for information tracked by the federal budget office. That compares with roughly one billion hours spent on similar paperwork in 1981, which in hindsight looks to have been a refreshingly uncomplicated time.

“Jumping up to 10 billion in 20 years’’ is no small feat, said David S. Cordray, a statistics professor at Vanderbilt University, who oversaw reports on government bureaucracy as a former federal official. “I wish the stock market had done that.’’