ABSTRACT
Federal information demands have grown rapidly in the absence of an adequate system to assess the value and the burden of government information collections. Information is not free, and the compensation approach recognizes that federal information requests result in real and significant costs to respondents and that agencies ought to be responsible for those costs. Legal precedent, existing federal programs that compensate for the costs of providing information, and proposed legislation currently pending before Congress will be examined to demonstrate that compensatory information collection is a feasible approach to reducing the amount of federal paperwork. There are cases of respondents having to provide the same or similar information to different agencies, cases in which the amount of information collected exceeds the collecting agency's ability to process it, and, finally, cases in which information is collected and coded but never used. The old census protest cases discussed at length the duty of citizens to provide government with the information it seeks.
