Promoting regulatory transparency
Everyone benefits from a more transparent regulatory process. Businesses can easily find the regulations they must comply with. Citizens can file regulatory comments and participate in the rulemaking process. Agencies can achieve better compliance rates by ensuring regulated parties understand their obligations.
Unfortunately, state regulation can be far from transparent. New regulations are often buried on an agency website and difficult to find. Guidance documents are often even harder to access and don’t always appear online. Businesses are frequently blindsided when agencies introduce new rules. And in some cases, the regulatory code itself is difficult to find or is scattered across multiple documents rather than appearing in an easy-to-navigate website.
States should ensure that all regulatory materials are as accessible as possible. At a bare minimum, this involves posting every existing regulation and guidance document online in an easy-to-use format. And it requires creating a centralized webpage that allows the public to read and comment on new rules.
It also involves ensuring that regulations are accessible to artificial intelligence tools. AI can now scan regulations and produce extraordinary insights, flagging areas for streamlining and improvement. But that is only possible if the regulations are freely accessible and machine readable.
commonly asked questions & resources
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Though most states have a website that lists existing regulations and regulations in progress, very few states notify the public of anticipated regulations. This is unfortunate, since businesses and citizens need to plan for future regulatory obligations and prepare to file comments on proposed regulations.
Virginia addressed this problem by adopting the Unified Regulatory Plan (URP). It lists every single regulation and guidance document that agencies plan to issue in the coming fiscal year. You can see Virginia’s URP here.
Fulcrum Foundation leadership includes the Virginia officials who created the URP. Fulcrum can sit down with state leadership and implement a plan to notify the public of future actions. It can also help state leadership identify the stakeholder groups that will most benefit from advanced notice of future regulations and undertake appropriate outreach.
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Artificial intelligence is remarkably effective at combing through different types of documents and pulling together different sources of information. But it performs far better when the key documents are clear, easily accessible, and well-organized.
Virginia’s Legislative Information System (LIS) is a model for other states to follow. It includes a clear, well-organized compendium of every regulatory requirement. You can access Virginia LIS here.
Like most other states, Virginia does a less impressive job of providing comprehensive access to all citations undergirding its regulations. Key statutory provisions often appear in lengthy budget bills that are hard to access. And state agencies often cite only some of the federal and state statutory requirements underpinning their regulations. AI has a hard time assessing whether a regulation is authorized or mandated if it cannot easily find the associated statutes.
Fulcrum Foundation leadership can work with states to ensure that their regulations are easily accessible and properly cited. It can help states build the necessary architecture, and it can connect states with low-cost vendors to build any lacking infrastructure.
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