WOOL RULES: Agency Information Collection Activities; Proposed Collection; Comment Request.

On January 16, 2018, the Federal Trade Commission published in the Federal Register (83 FR 2154) Agency Information Collection Activities; Proposed Collection; Comment Request.

The Wool Products Labeling Act of 1939 ("Wool Act") prohibits the misbranding of wool products. The Wool Rules establish disclosure requirements that assist consumers in making informed purchasing decisions and recordkeeping requirements that assist the Commission in enforcing the Rules.

Estimated Annual Hours Burden: 1,880,000 hours (160,000 recordkeeping hours + 1,720,000 disclosure hours). Recordkeeping: Staff estimates that approximately 4,000 wool firms are subject to the Wool Rules’ recordkeeping requirements. Based on an average annual burden of 40 hours per firm, the total recordkeeping burden is 160,000 hours.

Disclosure: Approximately 8,000 wool firms, producing or importing about 600,000,000 wool products annually, are subject to the Wool Rules’ disclosure requirements. Staff estimates the burden of determining label content to be 30 hours per year per firm, or a total of 240,000 hours, and the burden of drafting and ordering labels to be 60 hours per firm per year, or a total of 480,000 hours. Staff believes that the process of attaching labels is now fully automated and integrated into other production steps for about 40 percent of all affected products. For the remaining 360,000,000 items (60 percent of 600,000,000), the process is semiautomated and requires an average of approximately ten seconds per item, for a total of 1,000,000 hours per year. Thus, the total estimated annual burden for all firms is 1,720,000 hours (240,000 hours for determining label content + 480,000 hours to draft and order labels + 1,000,000 hours to attach labels). Staff believes that any additional burden associated with advertising disclosure requirements would be minimal (less than 10,000 hours) and can be subsumed within the burden estimates set forth above.

Estimated Annual Cost Burden: $16,380,000, rounded to the nearest thousand (solely relating to labor costs)

DATES: Comments must be received on or before March 19, 2018.