Intercom, Volume 14, Number 1, July 1980 Page: 4 of 50
50 p. : col. Ill. ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Government paperwork: the cost? j
Industry spends millions yearly
Reprinted from Today, employee magazine of
Martin Marietta Corporation.
The federal government now spends something
like a billion dollars a year for forms, another billion for
directives telling you how to fill them out, and another
$1.7 billion to store them.
Add up all the forms annually issued by federal, state
and local governments and they come to a staggering
2 billion pages. That's about 10 pages for every man,
woman and child in the United States.
There are 16 warehouses of federal records around
the country containing a total of more than 12 million
cubic feet of paper. Piled up, some analysts have
appropriately pointed out, this material would form a
structure equal in girth and a dozen times as tall as
the Washington Monument. And, of course, the volume
keeps growing.
Overall, American business spends approximately
$30 billion a year on federal paperwork, responding to
requests and requirements for information from pay-
rolls to pensions to production, from energy to equal
opportunity to the environment, from safety to sales
expectations to annual surveys of scientific and technical
personnel.
The 10,000 largest firms in the country expend
hundreds of millions of man-hours gathering, processing
and preparing the vast range of information involved,
then storing material that must be retained. The bill
for this vast effort plus related costs such as computer
support comes to an estimated $10 to $12 billion a year,
or an average of more than $1 million for each company. I
Some 5 million small businesses spend $15 to $20
billion, or an average of more than $3,000 each, which M
in some cases may be at least as burdensome as the much
larger costs to larger organizations.
Even these astronomical numbers cover, of course,
only a minor portion of the total cost of complying with
federal and local regulations in many fields. Paperwork
is the administrative tip of the iceberg. But it is clearly
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INTER COM, JULY 1980
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Tandy Corporation. Radio Shack Division. Intercom, Volume 14, Number 1, July 1980, periodical, July 1980; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1764407/m1/4/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.