Report: EPA Could Be Relying on Fraudulent Data

As the Environmental Protection Agency prepares major new regulations on carbon emissions, the agency’s top watchdog is warning that fraudulent environmental data may be influencing its work. The findings could provide fodder for critics of the new regulation, who warn that it could cost the U.S. economy billions and cause hundreds of thousands of Americans to lose their jobs. “The EPA lacks a due diligence process for potential fraudulent environmental data,” the agency’s inspector general warned in a report released on Thursday. Existing processes for weeding out such data, the report said, are “out of date or unimplemented.” “Our survey of EPA regional staff on their knowledge and use of the EPA’s fraudulent data policies and procedures found that a majority of respondents were unaware there was a policy, and approximately 50 percent expressed the need for such policies and procedures,” the report said. The EPA relies in large measure on federal contractors to gather environmental data on which the agency bases its regulatory decisions. However, a lack of communication with those contractors and clear guidelines on investigative procedures has created confusion with respect to the processes by which fraudulent data is rooted out and corrected. Similar problems plague interactions between EPA and state environmental regulators, the report found...more