GOVERNMENT: Report on Reports

BUSINESS & FINANCE

With pardonable pride, Donald M. Nelson’s committee-to-cut-down-paperwork (TIME, July 13) this week reported on the biggest operation on red tape in history. Their before & after report on reports made phantasmagoric reading.

Before: One auto company moaned that on one occasion it had to spend $125,000 and 100,000 man-hours to fill out Government forms. Another tiny manufacturer got so far behind on his paperwork that he had to shut down for three weeks to catch up. Some tell-us-everything forms “reached the dimensions of a small window shade” (at the same time that WPB prohibited the sale of wide-carriage typewriters). Worst of all, the committee found that, despite an early Nelson order allegedly limiting data requests, eager WPBureaucrats “with convenient mimeograph machines” were sending out sheaves of “bootleg” forms, not to mention countless stop-the-press telegraphic requests for information and duplicating queries from decentralized regional offices.

After: The committee took credit for saving industry 30,000,000 man-hours of paperwork a year (enough, had they been productive, to turn out more than 1,000 bombers). One hundred twenty forms were eliminated, 132 more simplified, reducing the number of forms 20% from the heyday of red tape, eliminating more than 50% of the actual paperwork required. One of the defunct forms would have cost one industry alone 400,000 man-hours a year; it would have cost the Government 100,000 more man-hours. As for the “bootleggers,” the committee wryly reported that they had been “eliminated” by the beautifully simple “expedient of taking errant mimeograph machines into custody, and providing that no financial reimbursement be allowed for printing . . . or sending unauthorized data requests.”

Small wonder, as one proud committeeman bragged last week, that “we were the most unpopular committee in WPB but business just loved us.” Don Nelson planted himself squarely on the side of business, extended his red-tape surgeons’ practice to Dec. 31.