Recommendation: The Assistant Administrator for Water of EPA's Office of Water should require states to report available information about lead pipes to EPA's Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS)/Fed (or a future redesign such as SDWIS Prime) database, in its upcoming revision of the LCR. (Recommendation 1)

Agency: Environmental Protection Agency
Status: Open
Priority recommendation

Comments: As of July 2020 there has been no change in the status of this recommendation. In July 2019, EPA said that the 2016 America's Water Infrastructure Act (AWIA) requires EPA to conduct an assessment of the costs to replace lead service lines and that EPA would conduct this assessment (a survey) in 2020. In a previous update, EPA said that it would consider GAO's recommendation to require states to report available information about lead pipes along with those of other stakeholders as part of the development of the revisions to the Lead and Copper Rule. EPA officials estimated that the agency would publish a proposal for the revisions in 2019.

Recommendation: The Assistant Administrator for Water of EPA's Office of Water should require states to report all 90th percentile sample results for small water systems to EPA's SDWIS/Fed (or a future redesign such as SDWIS Prime) database, in its upcoming revision of the LCR. (Recommendation 2)

Agency: Environmental Protection Agency
Status: Open
Priority recommendation

Comments: As of July 2020 there has been no change in the status of this recommendation. In July 2019, EPA said that it would consider GAO's recommendation to require states to report all 90th percentile sample results for small systems along with those of other stakeholders as part of the development of the revisions to the Lead and Copper Rule. EPA officials estimated that a proposal for the revisions would be published in 2019.

Recommendation: The Assistant Administrator for Water of EPA's Office of Water and the Assistant Administrator of EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance should develop a statistical analysis that incorporates multiple factors--including those currently in SDWIS/Fed and others such as the presence of lead pipes and the use of corrosion control--to identify water systems that might pose a higher likelihood for violating the LCR once complete violations data are obtained, such as through SDWIS Prime. (Recommendation 3)

Agency: Environmental Protection Agency
Status: Open
Priority recommendation

Comments: As of July 2020 there has been no change in the status of this recommendation. In July 2019, EPA stated that the agency developed a Lead and Cooper Rule (LCR) violation reporting tool that is updated and distributed to the EPA regional offices on a quarterly basis. This tool, according to EPA, enhances national oversight by fostering closer engagement with the regional offices to continuously assess any new water systems violating the LCR. EPA has stated that the agency has also developed, and shared with its regional offices, an internal resource to make ad hoc assessments of water systems, nationwide, that would benefit most from assistance with lead service line replacements or (for water systems without lead service lines) corrosion control treatment installation/re-optimization. According to EPA, this internal resource takes a multi-factor approach that considers historical action level exceedance occurrences and information on additional factors (for which information is already available through regulatory development efforts for the LCR long-term revisions or internet search engine queries). These additional factors include the number of lead service lines known to be present in a given water system; the proportion of a system's service connections that are served by lead service lines; and potential technical, managerial, and financial capacity challenges experienced by that system. Although EPA has made progress in addressing the recommendation, GAO will leave this recommendation open until SDWIS Prime is implemented.

Recommendation: To strengthen BLM's controls and reasonably assure accountability over mining law program expenditures, both payroll and nonpayroll, the Secretary of the Interior should direct the Director of the Bureau of Land Management to establish procedures for regular and timely communication to all BLM employees on policy and procedural changes affecting the mining law program's expenditure-related processes.

Agency: Department of the Interior
Status: Open

Comments: The Department of Interior's (DOI) Bureau of Land Management (BLM) agreed with our recommendation. In support of closing this recommendation, officials from BLM re-iterated their policy about sending updates regarding guidance changes, which is included in its directives handbook. They also provided us with an example of its timely communication to BLM employees to announce the issuance of its revised Fund Code Handbook. We reviewed the directives handbook and verified that it contains guidance for communicating policy and procedural changes affecting the mining law program's expenditure-related processes. While the guidance in the directives handbook is a good start towards meeting the intent of our recommendation, we communicated to BLM in fiscal year 2019 that the findings in the report were caused in part by inadequate communication processes and the accessibility of the guidance to staff. To address the recommendation, we would like to see evidence that BLM has established procedures to ensure proper communication of changes or policies to the staff using BLM guidance, which includes having written procedures on how BLM publishes updates or communicates policy information, where guidance should be published in BLM's internal page, and the BLM officials who are in charge of that process. In fiscal year 2020, we have sent additional follow-up questions to the agency and are currently waiting for a response. We will continue to monitor the agency's actions to address this recommendation.