Environmental Protection: More Consistency Needed Among EPA Regions in Approach to Enforcement
RCED-00-108
Published: Jun 01, 2000. Publicly Released: Jul 05, 2000.
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Highlights
Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the consistency of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) regional offices' enforcement of environmental requirements, focusing on: (1) the extent to which variations exist among EPA's regional offices in the actions they take to enforce environmental requirements; (2) what factors contribute to any variations; and (3) what EPA is doing to achieve consistency in regional enforcement activities.
Recommendations
Recommendations for Executive Action
| Agency Affected | Recommendation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Environmental Protection Agency | The Administrator, EPA, should provide, as part of EPA's efforts to develop Program Status Reports containing comparative data on regional and state enforcement performance, the contextual information needed to help EPA management and the public properly understand them. |
In distributing the Program Status Reports in June 2000, EPA included the kind of contextual information suggested by the recommendation explaining the appropriate use and interpretation of the information by those evaluating regional and state performance.
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| Environmental Protection Agency | The Administrator, EPA, should develop a comprehensive strategy that will bring to bear sufficient priority and resources so that the problems affecting the quality of EPA's enforcement data can be adequately addressed. |
The report recommended that EPA "develop a comprehensive strategy that will bring to bear sufficient priority and resources so that the problems affecting the quality of EPA's enforcement data can be adequately addressed." Development of the data quality strategy is presently underway. The agency has already addressed the resource issue as stated in the recommendation by completing in November 2000 a reassignment process in which staff were assigned to data quality management.
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| Environmental Protection Agency | The Administrator, EPA, should issue guidance to EPA regions describing the required elements of audit protocols to be used in overseeing state enforcement programs. |
Since the time of this recommendation, EPA has begun to use oversight tools called "Program Element Reviews" to target their enforcement oversight for individual programs. In doing so, the agency has developed a protocol for the Program Element Reviews that sets out standards and specific questions to be answered in the review of the state enforcement programs. The result is expected to be a "reasonably standardized state review conducted by each EPA region."
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Topics
Environmental lawEnvironmental policiesstate relationsIndustrial pollutionLaw enforcementNoncompliancePerformance measuresPollution controlProgram evaluationState-administered programsProtocols