Compliance as Data Work
Abstract
Regulatory compliance increasingly relies on the labor of producing, managing, and transmitting digital information-a form of work largely invisible to administrative law. Although agencies often justify these requirements in terms of efficiency, transparency, and accountability, the burdens they impose fall unevenly across regulated communities, raising questions about fairness and practical feasibility. Agencies require stakeholders to maintain detailed digital records, yet doctrines designed to protect against overreach fail to account for the costs, expertise, and inequities these mandates impose.
This Article examines these burdens through an empirical analysis of over a thousand public comments responding to a federal rule mandating granular digital records. While the rule itself concerns food supply chains, it serves as a lens to study a broader pattern: digital mandates across the administrative state frequently redistribute labor in ways that are invisible to current legal frameworks. Drawing on qualitative methods and informed by feminist approaches to data, the Article identifies three recurring challenges: (1) the labor and educational costs of learning new systems; (2) collisions with infrastructural and cultural realities; and (3) regulatory “flexibility” that generates costly ambiguity.
These burdens expose systemic blind spots in administrative law. Doctrines that treat information collection as neutral, whether by collapsing digital labor into “paperwork hours,” discounting lived experience, or limiting review to only the smallest entities, fail to account for how digital mandates redistribute work and risk. This Article argues that administrative law must recognize data labor as labor and proposes equity-focused reforms, including Data Equity Impact Assessments, to better align digital compliance with the goals of participation, accountability, and inclusion. While illustrated through food regulation, the lessons extend broadly across sectors, from health care and finance to immigration and environmental governance, demonstrating that the stakes of equity in the digital administrative state are both immediate and far-reaching.
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