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