Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 as amended in 1995. The PRA requires that all federal forms be reviewed and approved by the Office of Management and Budget to e

Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 as amended in 1995. The PRA requires that all federal forms be reviewed and approved by the Office of Management and Budget to ensure that they are not unnecessarily burdensome, it also requires that an estimate of the public burden of the paperwork be prepared and published. The key method here is to estimate the amount of time required to fill out the form and then multiply that by a standard hourly expense rate, so you will usually also see the estimated time required to complete a form. That estimate involves any research or calculations required, so on some forms it can be very long, e.g. the SF-86 at two and a half hours each. While the fact that the paperwork Reduction Act created this new bureaucratic step is amusing, it served to rectify the earlier situation where a lot of federal paperwork was unreasonably complicated just because it was nobody's job to make it otherwise.