TheWeekInCongress.com
Week Ending May 21, 2004
HR 2728 Occupational Safety and Health Small Business Day in Court Act of 2004.
BRIEF
HR2728 amends the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) of 1970 to exempt employers from a 15-day deadline for notifying the Secretary of Labor of their intent to contest citations, notices of uncorrected violations, and proposed penalties issued by OSHA. Employers would be exempt if their failure to meet such deadlines were the result of mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect. The bill would enact other elements from previous legislation put forth in the House such as awarding legal fees to defendant businesses that prevail in court,
Sponsor: Charlie Norwood (R-GA)
Vote: Passed House 251 – 177 (RC 183)
Cost to the taxpayer: No discernible cost
MORE INFORMATION
Employers who face adjudication for an alleged violation and prevail in court and who, at the time of the original complaint employed fewer than 101 people and had a net worth of $7 million or less could be awarded legal fees. The award would not take into consideration that OSHA's position was substantially justified or other special circumstances would make the award unjust.
Paperwork would also be targeted by the bill as Congress finds that:
The paperwork Reduction Act in 1980 established the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and gave it the principal responsibility to reduce the paperwork burden on the public that results from the collection of information by or for the Federal Government.
OIRA estimated in 2002 that the paperwork burden imposed on the public was 7.7 billion hours, at a cost of $230 billion. The Internal Revenue Service accounted for 83 percent of the paperwork burden.
In 1995, Congress amended the Paperwork Reduction Act and established annual government-wide paperwork reduction goals of 10 percent for each of fiscal years 1996 and 1997, and 5 percent for each of fiscal years 1998 through 2001, but the paperwork burden increased, rather than decreased, in each of those fiscal years and fiscal year 2002
Congress would hold that both the OMB and the IRS need to devote additional attention to paperwork reduction. One key to success in paperwork reduction is the OMB's systematic review of every new and revised agency paperwork proposal.. Recent statutory exemptions from OMB's review responsibility, especially those without any stated justification, should be reversed.
Congress has further considered that, in 2000, researchers Mark Crain of George Mason University and Thomas Hopkins of the Rochester Institute of Technology, in their October 2001 publication titled `The Impact of Regulatory Costs on Small Firms', estimated that Americans spend $843 billion annually to comply with Federal regulations.
Director of OMB shall (in consultation with the IRS and the Office of Tax Policy of the Department of the Treasury and the Office of Advocacy of the Small Business Administration) conduct a review of the collections of information conducted by the Internal Revenue Service to identify actions that the Internal Revenue Service can take to reduce the information collection burden imposed on small business concerns.
Exemptions to the Paperwork Reduction Act would be repealed.
HR 2728 would also amend the Truth in Regulating Act to make permanent a pilot project that would report on rules and, essentially, study the regulating process the government involves itself in. The authority to request the performance of regulatory analysis to enhance Congressional responsibility for regulatory decisions developed under the laws enacted by Congress is made permanent and funded at $5 million yearly after 2004.##