FRA ICR for Reporting Alleged Violations Submitted to OMB

Yesterday the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) submitted their information collection request (ICR) to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to allow the FRA to collect information from the public about alleged violations of Federal railroad safety and hazardous materials transportation laws, regulations, and orders. The collection would take place on the FRA web site via an on-line form. The FRA was directed to set up this collection by §307(b) of the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (P.L.110-432).

I briefly wrote about this ICR back in June when the required 30-day notice was published in the Federal Register (75 FR 34802). Typically the submission to the OMB is made at about the same time as the 30-day notice is published. This is because the public comments (if any) on the 30-day notice were directed to the OMB. According to the ICR submission no public comments were received on either the 30-day notice or the earlier 60-day notice (75 FR 18012).

There is no indication on the OMB site why there was a three-month delay in actually submitting the ICR to OMB. There was no deadline in the authorizing legislation for this particular information collection, so I suppose there is no big rush. After all we are only talking about safety incident reporting here. Nothing really important….