Week in Regulation

2.4 Million Burden Hours

After a record-setting week, regulators added $142 million in regulatory burdens, or 45 cents per person. Annualized costs were $87 million and there were no rulemakings with monetized benefits. A Medicare payment proposal added 2.4 million hours of paperwork, leading the week.       

Regulatory Toplines

  • New Proposed Rules: 38
  • New Final Rules: 63
  • 2014 Significant Documents: 345
  • 2014 Total Pages of Regulation: 40,618
  • 2014 Proposed Rules: $48.2 Billion
  • 2014 Final Rules: $56.8 Billion

AAF has catalogued regulations according to their codification in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). The CFR is organized into 50 titles, with each title corresponding to an industry or part of government. This snapshot will help to determine which sectors of the economy receive the highest number of regulatory actions.

The administration’s revised Medicare payment proposal was the costliest measure this week. It could impose $81 million in costs and 2.4 million hours of paperwork on more than 14 million manufacturers, rural health clinics, and physicians. To put the paperwork in context, it would require 1,248 employees working full-time to complete one year of the regulatory requirements.

Affordable Care Act

There were no notable heath care rulemakings this week. Since passage, based on total lifetime costs of the regulations, the Affordable Care Act has imposed a revised cost of $27.5 billion in private-sector burdens, approximately $12.3 billion in costs to the states, and 159.2 million annual paperwork hours.

Dodd-Frank

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) finalized a regulation for “Security-Based Swap Dealers” this week. The rule would impose total costs eclipsing $70 million with 36,000 associated paperwork burden hours.

Click here to view the total estimated compliance costs from Dodd-Frank; since passage, the legislation has produced more than 60.7 million paperwork burden hours and imposed $21.8 billion in direct compliance costs. Based on calculations from the Financial Services Roundtable, Dodd-Frank regulations would require 30,374 employees to file federal paperwork.

A Note on Notices

There were 482 notices published in the Federal Register this week. However, there were no particularly notable actions.

The Office of Management and Budget approved 43 paperwork requirements, increasing the paperwork burden hours by 4.9 million hours. There were four major changes to existing paperwork requirements (defined as an hourly burden increase or decrease of 500,000 or greater).

The largest increase in paperwork burden hours imposed by an information collection requirement (ICR) was 3.9 million hours from the Department of Defense. The largest decrease in paperwork burden hours imposed by an ICR was -815,373 hours from the General Service Administration.

Total Burdens

Since January 1, the federal government has published $105.1 billion in compliance costs and has imposed 16.8 million in net paperwork burden hours. Click here for our comprehensive database of regulations and rulemakings promulgated in 2014.

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