Compliance FY 2022 Annual Results

OECA promotes the use of the full range of compliance and enforcement tools to advance compliance goals:

Inspections
ECHO Transparency Initiatives Empower Local Communities
Evidence Based Compliance Assurance
Voluntary Disclosures
Compliance Assistance

Inspections

Inspections are critical to uncovering violations of environmental laws, and they are also an important means for EPA to establish a visible presence among regulated entities that operate in or impact overburdened or vulnerable communities. Increasing federal inspections of facilities that affect communities with potential environmental justice (EJ) concerns is a cornerstone of the Progress Report on Incorporating Environmental Justice into Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Work (pdf) (230.07 KB) . OECA set a fiscal year (FY) 2022 national goal to increase the number of inspections in overburdened communities to 45% of the total number of inspections. In FY 2022, the Agency performed over 5,800 inspections, with over 3,300, or 56%, in areas of potential EJ concern, which is up from 29% in FY 2021.

Re-building the Inspector Corps: In FY 2022, EPA continued to train and credential new inspectors for public drinking water treatment facilities, increasing the number of credentialed inspectors from 39 in FY 2019 to over 70 in Calendar Year 2022.

Geospatial Measurement of Air Pollution (GMAP)
EPA maximized the use of advanced monitoring technologies, such as the GMAP mobile air monitoring vehicle, to support Clean Air Act (CAA) inspections, identify emissions that potentially impact neighboring communities, and target facilities for inspections. The GMAP vehicle was a critical tool in following up on the Administrator’s Journey to Justice tour in Louisiana in January 2022 [add link].
Smart Mobile Tools for Field Inspectors (Smart Tools)
EPA has developed electronic software, or the Smart Tools application, to increase the efficiency of Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and Clean Water Act/National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System inspectors. EPA continued enhancement on both modules and expanded to include software modules for federal Underground Storage Tank and for Good Laboratory Practices inspectors. The software for those two business areas will be implemented in FY 2023.

ECHO Transparency Initiatives Empower Local Communities

In 2022, OECA released ECHO Notify, an email service that allows communities to receive alerts when a local facility has a violation or enforcement action. To date 1,430 subscribers have signed up for this service. ECHO Notify has identified over 193,000 alerts and has sent out over 29,000 emails. The ECHO team also completed the release of a Refinery Benzene Fenceline Dashboard. The dashboard allows public users to identify high benzene readings nearby communities.

Evidence-Based Compliance Assurance

OECA continues to build a foundation for a national evidence-based enforcement and compliance assurance program designed to strengthen EPA’s enforcement programs.  The foundation is made up of three elements that together will provide the framework for a state/tribal/EPA partnership to support the evolution of an innovative and effective compliance assurance program.  The three areas are:

Customer-focused, evidence-based inspection and enforcement targeting.

EPA’s implementation of the Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (Evidence Act) via the Drinking Water Learning Agenda; and
The Compliance Learning Agenda - identifying the most pressing programmatic questions and establishing an evaluation plan, partnering with states, Tribes, and academics on a series of evidence-building research projects designed to answer those questions.

Voluntary Disclosures

The EPA Audit Policy, formally titled “Incentives for Self- Policing: Discovery, Disclosure, Correction and Prevention of Violations,” safeguards human health and the environment by providing incentives for regulated entities to voluntarily discover, fix, and disclose violations of federal environmental laws and regulations.  This year, EPA received 601 voluntary self-disclosures (or new owner audit agreements) covering 942 facilities.

Compliance Assistance

Compliance Advisor Programs – Sustainable Water Systems and PCB Safe Handling

The Compliance Advisors for Sustainable Water Systems program provides hands-on technical assistance and support to small drinking water and wastewater systems, the majority in vulnerable overburdened communities. The program is currently supporting approximately 262 systems in total – 63 of which are wastewater systems and 199 of which are drinking water systems. To date, 55 systems have completed their technical assistance support from the Compliance Advisors. Since the start of the project, more than 1,000 technical assistance products, such as standard operating procedures, manuals, plans, and other tools, have been provided to systems to help them return to compliance.

In FY 2022, EPA created a second Compliance Advisors program, named Compliance Advisors PCB Safe Handling (CAPSH) program. This program provides nationwide technical assistance to PCB treatment, storage, and disposal facilities. CAPSH is designed to help individual PCB facilities come into compliance, if needed; identify trends that may warrant coordinated outreach to the industry sector; improve national consistency; and inform EPA PCB coordinators of important issues related to approvals of application conditions. In FY 2022, the CAPSH program compliance advisors visited 12 facilities in three regions.

Compliance Advisories and Enforcement Alerts

EPA uses a variety of methods to engage and communicate information with stakeholders. Compliance assistance tools to provide access to the information regulated entities and stakeholders need, in a way that helps explain the steps needed to comply with make sense of environmental regulations. Assistance is provided through both Compliance Advisories and Enforcement Alerts issued by OECA; they address select provisions of EPA regulatory requirements using plain language.

In 2022, OECA issued four advisory/alert documents addressing noncompliance concerns with public water systems, vehicle engine emissions, small wastewater treatment lagoons with Clean Water Act discharge permits, and potential risks from exposure to PFAS contained in ski wax products. An index of issued documents is available online.

Compliance Assistance Centers

Compliance Assistance Centers are virtual resource centers to help businesses, colleges and universities, local governments, tribes, and federal facilities understand and comply with environmental requirements and save money through pollution prevention techniques. The Center program and Center resources consists of nine industry-specific Compliance Assistance Centers, 21 State Resource Locators, five topic-specific Ports, the Platform, and the Compliance Assistance Gateway. Each Center addresses real world issues faced by a specific industry or government sector.

In FY 2022, the Centers had increased views of webpages by five percent (5.05 million page views), of which 259,000 were attributed to the Local Government Environmental Assistance Network (LGEAN) compliance assistance center. A large effort for LGEAN during FY 2022 involved the redevelopment of the functionality, design, and content of the site, including exclusive webinar and podcast content (over 700 podcast listens). Another major effort during FY 2022 involved a partnership with EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management and the Healthcare Environmental Resource Center to write and publish “Managing Pharmaceutical Waste: A 10-Step Blueprint for Healthcare Facilities, 2022 Version (PDF),” which covers the most recent federal regulations for hazardous waste pharmaceuticals (Subpart P).