OIRA Disapproves CSB Reactive Hazards Study ICR

Yesterday, the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) announced that it had disapproved an information collection request from the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) on “CSB Reactive Hazard Study Survey of Industry Practices”. This ICR was designed to support a one-time voluntary questionnaire to collect information about industry practices around industry practices dealing with reactive chemistry. Yesterday’s action would mean that the Board could not proceed with the Survey.

The 60-day ICR notice was published on July 7^th, 2023 and the 30-day ICR notice was published on September 12th, 2023.

Yesterday’s notice discussed :

“The agency must provide in its resubmission clarifying information about this new collection, including 1) what information is being collected; 2) who you're collecting it from; 3) why you're collecting it; what is the estimated burden cost, i.e., the time (in hours), financial considerations, and paperwork needed for the collection; and how will the information be used once you've collected it. The agency must also address how it intends to protect any Privacy Act information and confidential business information. The information collection instrument should also be revised accordingly.”

While the CSB did have a proposed copy of the questionnaire posted to their web site, it is not included on the list of the documents submitted to the CSB. Many of the questions that OIRA had about the ICR would have been explicated in the questionnaire document.

Looking at the Supporting Document that the CSB submitted with the application, there does appear to be a misunderstanding of the Privacy Act concerns that OIRA has keyed in on. The proposed questionnaire does include (pg 4) questions for which a respondent would be expected to provide personally identifiable information; this would require that the Board have a Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) policy dealing with the disclosure of such information. A copy of a PRA policy document is typically included in such ICR submissions.

Commentary

The CSB continues to have problems with ICR’s (see here and here), but that is more a function of the fact that they only have the one other ICR (Chemical Incident Reporting). This means that the staff is probably not fully up to speed on the ICR submittal process. Interestingly, the National Transportation Safety Board, which has a somewhat similar operation, has 21 active ICRs.