"There is some chance this may be apocryphal (I don't see any evidence the reporters confirmed this with the FDA), but as someone who has had government inspectors show up on our property demanding to see our license to sell eggs, it wouldn't surprise me if true. I am bombarded with government insanity of this genre every day."...
..."One piece of advice I would give to harried small business people is to say "no" as often as possible to these data requests. Obviously, you will need to turn in your monthly sales tax reports or you will be going to jail, but do you really need to feed the census? The department of Commerce? The Department of Agriculture? The Labor Department? Much of this data they gather is used either 1) to craft regulations that will just make your life as a business owner harder in the future or 2) to subsidize academics and economists in the form of free data. As I told the Labor Department the other day, I am happy to fill out their survey if they want to pay me, say, $100 a month to compensate me for my time. Otherwise they are just stealing free labor and proprietary data from me to help some grad student write her PHD or help some Wall Street hedge fund manager better call the market."
