The Information Quality Act

Under Guise of Information 'Quality,' a New Hurdle to Sensible Safeguards

 

In December 2000, Congress passed a two-paragraph provision buried deep in an appropriations bill that required agencies to ensure and maximize the quality of information that they disseminate, and to establish an error-correction process.  The provision gave the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) the power to issue guidelines to agencies about how to implement the requirement.  

 

The provision’s provenance was of particular interest. It had never been the subject of hearings, committee review or debate. Rather, it was inserted into the appropriations bill by Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) at the behest of Jim Tozzi, a former OMB-official who runs the corporate sponsored Center for Regulatory Effectiveness.  Most of Members of Congress voted on the bill without knowing of the provision’s existence.

 

The provision, known both as the Data Quality Act and the Information Quality Act – the confusion over naming stems from its never having undergone the legislative process to begin with – required OMB and federal agencies to establish procedures to ensure the quality of information disseminated by government, a worthy enough goal on its face. But the requirements have also introduced an important side effect: they slow down the government’s capacity to act.

 
As CPR Member Scholar Sidney Shapiro writes in a CPR Perspective,
 

[T]he benefits of imposing additional procedures have to be balanced against the consequences to the public of delaying agency action. In the case of data quality, the goal of ensuring the quality of information has to be reconciled with the substantive mission of an agency and the role of disseminated data in the implementation of that mission. Unfortunately, Congress gave little indication of how these competing goals were to be reconciled. It defined none of the key terms of the rider, and left no legislative history. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, an ill-defined statute invites government officials and interested parties to interpret it to serve their own ends.

 

In the years since the adoption of the provision, regulated industries have used it to lob a variety of challenges at government regulators. For example, in January 2005, CPR Scholars Robert Verchick, Rena Steinzor, and Sidney Shapiro, joined by CPR Policy Analyst Margaret Clune, called on EPA to take a series of steps to protect the health of East Baton Rouge-area residents whose food supply has been poisoned by PCB pollution in the Devil's SwampLake. Among industry's many efforts to avoid taking responsibility for cleaning up its mess: an Information Quality Act challenge. Read more.

 

One approach industry had hoped to put to even more debilitating effect was to bring lawsuits challenging agency rulings on information quality challenges. So far, the courts have rejected such litigation on the grounds that the law does not provide for judicial review.

 
Read CPR Member Scholars’ work on the Information Quality Act: