Paperwork Reduction Act, Paperless Edition

There's a dull-looking but actually rather interesting sign of the times in the Federal Register today. It's a Paperwork Reduction Act "Notice of Submission of Proposed Information Collection," following the pattern used to approve innumerable kinds of government forms. The thing is, this notice requests comments on HUD's electronic Multifamily Financial Management Template. (The comments are due Nov. 14.) I don't quite know if this is the first time a notice of this type has been issued for an electronic form, but certainly it can't have happened all that often in HUD's part of the Federal Register thus far. In any event it means HUD has understood that it needs to invite and accept public comments on its computerized interactions with the public. So: another step taken in the fascinating trial-and-error process by which our public agencies are adapting paper-based administrative law to the new situations of the paperless office.

On the subject of computerization, by the way, GAO posted a report yesterday on the federal agencies' progress in electronic rulemaking.