Monday, April 22, 2013

Link of the Month: Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is located within the Office of Management and Budget and was created by Congress with the enactment of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 (PRA). OIRA carries out several important functions, including reviewing Federal regulations, reducing paperwork burdens, and overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.

The Regulatory Review Dashboard at www.reginfo.gov, is the offices public website disclosing information about OIRA's review of draft regulations, as well as allowing access to a number of publications surrounding regulations and rulemaking produced by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the General Services Administration (GSA).

The “Unified Agenda” tab is the entry point for the semiannual Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions and the annual Regulatory Plan, both required by Executive Order 12866, "Regulatory Planning and Review” and gathered and published by GSA's Regulatory Information Service Center (RISC).

Through the “regulatory review” tab the website gives access to federal regulations and information reviewed by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) as well as other services provided by the OIRA, for example government-wide policies on information technology, information quality, privacy, and statistics, which have been developed and overseen by the agency. The search of regulatory review allows search by agency, stage of rulemaking and other advanced criteria.

In addition, under the “Information Collection review” tab the ICR Dashboard provides an up-to-date and easy-to-follow graphical representation of information collections currently under review. The ICR Dashboard displays these information collections by agency, length of review, and type of ICR.