Letter to the editor
This is in regard to Diane Frank's article, "Paperwork burden getting worse" [FCW.com, April 25, 2001].
Most folks spend two to four hours a day on the computer reading or
writing and printing everything out. So much for the Paperwork Reduction
Act. It went the way of total quality management.
When government agencies from bottom to top put out statements (acts)
without rules, regulations, incentives or motivation to initiate such statements,
more paper and more printing is the result.
The only thing that having total online interactivity for government
employees did was to speed up the communication and amount of communication
between all aspects of government. There's also a read-what-is-printed and
preserve-it-on-paper mentality that makes mountains out of molehills. All
agencies now use tens of thousands times the paper they ever did before.
Want to change all that? Make paper copying or computer printing very,
very expensive by regulation and by policy for every office.
It'll never happen!
Will Atkinson
Army Corps of Engineers