Watchdog dings EPA on facility inspection data

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not kept accurate, consist records of air pollution inspection data for facilities, its internal watchdog said.

Auditors with the EPA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) initially thought that some facilities with federal Clean Air Act permits, like power plants or manufacturing facilities, had gone five years without a government inspection, which should happen every two years.

{mosads}But further research found that improper data management was in fact the problem and the reason why it appeared that hundreds of facilities were missing inspections.

“Inaccurate data hinder the EPA’s ability to use databases as a tool to oversee delegated agencies, and hinder the agency’s ability to provide reasonable assurance that compliance monitoring activities are being conducted,” the OIG wrote in a Tuesday report on the facility inspection information.

“Moreover, inaccurate data … could misinform the public about the status of [Clean Air Act facilities.”

The OIG also found that the EPA wasn’t properly overseeing the activities of state air agencies that were given the authority to conduct inspections and expected to properly report the data.

Auditors gave the EPA a number of recommendations to improve its data, all of which officials accepted and agreed to work toward.

Cynthia Giles, the EPA’s top enforcement official, wrote in a letter to the OIG that the main problem was the old database the EPA was using, and the issues are being resolved.

“As the OIG report points out, the data inaccuracies that were identified for some of facilities reviewed by the OIG were a result of data reporting errors entered into the former national CAA database, AFS,” she wrote. “EPA acknowledges these errors and agrees with the OIG that the information …for the subset of facilities with errors was either not reported or incorrectly reported.”