Guidance documents serve a very specific purpose: they provide information on achieving compliance with statutes and regulations. As a matter of law, they cannot impose binding obligations on regulated parties. They also should not contain extraneous information that is irrelevant to regulatory compliance. And they should be as short as possible. This week’s Highlights features the work of two agencies that have streamlined their guidance documents.

 

The Department of Professional and Occupation Regulation moves regulatory language out of guidance.

The Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation (DPOR) recently undertook several actions in which language containing regulatory requirements was moved out of guidance documents and into regulations.

As a result of this change, DPOR no longer needed the guidance documents, and it is now eliminating them (see GDForum ID: 2801). This will help DPOR achieve its 25% guidance document length reduction goal. More importantly, it will eliminate confusion for regulated parties by making sure that no regulatory language appears in guidance documents.

 

The Board of Accountancy streamlines a guidance document using AI-empowered analysis.

In July, the Governor’s Office issued Executive Order 51, which launched a first-in-the-nation pilot program using agentic artificial intelligence (AI) to scan regulatory text and identify opportunities for streamlining. That pilot is ongoing, and it has produced reports providing AI-generated insights to each executive branch agency.

One of the reports each agency receives offers recommended streamlining edits for each of its guidance documents. It’s often possible to say the same thing using fewer words, and the AI tool offers recommendations on how to rewrite certain passages to slim them down.

The Board of Accountancy recently issued a guidance document amendment (see GDForum ID: 2796) that implemented a variety of edits recommended by the AI tool (as well as making a handful of unrelated technical changes). The document provides the same information, but the edited version includes almost 15% fewer words.

Time is money for regulated parties who need to figure out how to achieve compliance. A shorter document will allow them to spend less time reading legal text and more time serving their customers.