The Senate rejected today a controversial amendment to a bankruptcy reform bill that would have given corporate special interests new incentives to refuse to provide information necessary for protecting the public. Proposed by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) as a late add-on to S. 256, the bill to benefit the credit industry by further reducing the bankruptcy option for people overburdened with debt, this amendment would have endangered public safeguards with new enforcement exemptions from information collection requirements. The amendment would have prohibited federal agencies from fining small businesses for �first-time� violations of paperwork requirements as long as the company complied within six months of notice of the violation (with some enumerated exceptions, such as tax collection paperwork). The prevailing practice is that agencies almost always waive fines for first-time paperwork violations, but they retain the flexibility to fine first-time violators when circumstances warrant fines � for example, when a business willfully violates a paperwork requirement, or when there is a need for rapid and timely compliance with an information collection requirement. The Santorum amendment would have eliminated this flexibility and actually could have encouraged even more violations, because small businesses would have known they could avoid reporting requirements � without fear of fine � until they were caught for the first time. Businesses could have many �first-time� violations under the Santorum amendment. When determining whether a violator was eligible for the �first-time� exemption, an agency would have been allowed to count violations only of that agency�s requirements � and would not have been able to look at a small business's violations of requirements from other agencies. A business could thus have failed to comply with a workplace safety requirement for Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a toxic substance report for Environmental Protection Agency, and a pension fund report under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act � each time getting the �first-time� violator exemption. The Santorum amendment would have endangered public safeguards of the public health, safety, civil rights and environment, because it would have weakened agencies� power to gather the information that can be the very basis of public protection. For example, when a worker safety protection is issued, businesses often need to report information so that agencies know whether or not businesses are actually complying and whether workers are getting the full benefit of the new protective standard. Businesses might also be required to post information so that workers know about their rights or learn about potential hazards and protect themselves on the job. Under the Santorum amendment, corporate special interests would have been allowed to deny us this needed information without consequences. In response to concerns raised by the public interest sector every time this language has been offered in previous Congresses, the Santorum amendment included an insufficient exception that would have allowed fines whenever �the agency determines that the violation presents a danger to public health or safety.� This exception ignored that information-gathering requirements are often the basis for determining whether there is a danger to public health or safety in the first instance. Without this collection of information, an agency would often have been unable to determine whether a paperwork violation actually presented such a danger and, as a result, would not have been able to take preventive measures to head off potential risk to the public. Although the Santorum amendment was considered a message amendment, primarily as a Republican alternative to the Kennedy minimum wage amendment, it used language that has been circulating since the 1990s. The Santorum amendment failed, on a 38�61 vote, to reach the 60 votes needed to amend the bankruptcy bill.