Summary

Most major environmental statutes allow the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to delegate the responsibility for key programs to qualified states. In order for states to obtain such responsibility, they generally are required to have adequate authority to inspect, monitor, and enforce the program. Recently, some state have supplemented these traditional enforcement activities with other, more cooperative approaches to improve compliance through technical assistance and various incentives. GAO discusses (1) the alternative compliance strategies that states are practicing, (2) whether and how states are measuring the effectiveness of these strategies, and (3) how EPA has responded to these states' efforts, focusing on the agency's objective of holding the states accountable for achieving environmental results, rather than focusing solely on enforcement processes. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress; see: Environmental Protection: EPA's and States' Efforts to Focus State Enforcement Program on Results, by Michael Gryszkowiec, Director of Planning and Reporting in the Resources, Community, and Economic Development Division, before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, House Committee on Commerce. GAO/T-RCED-98-233, June 23 (13 pages).

GAO noted that: (1) approaches used by 10 states contacted by GAO that are experimenting with alternative compliance strategies generally fall into two categories: (a) compliance assistance programs that seek to help dischargers comply with environmental requirements; and (b) programs that promote more flexible enforcement than is practiced under the current system; (2) most of the 10 states had developed some kind of compliance assistance program, which generally targets smaller facilities or businesses that may not understand the requirements or the most effective ways of achieving them; (3) nine of 10 states had some type of audit privilege/immunity program, four of which were authorized by the states' statutes; (4) there was broad agreement among the state and EPA officials contacted that the effectiveness of alternative compliance strategies should be measured and assessed; (5) nonetheless, states' efforts to measure the effectiveness of alternative compliance strategies have proven to be much more difficult than counting and reporting traditional enforcement outputs; (6) key challenges to developing results-oriented performance measures include the: (a) frequent absence of the baseline data needed to determine whether compliance rates or environmental quality have improved under new strategies; and (b) inherently greater difficulty and expense involved in quantifying outcomes, as compared with counting and reporting output measures; (7) since 1994, EPA has initiated a number of activities to facilitate states' efforts; (8) the agency has maintained a continued emphasis on strong enforcement, noting that the deterrent effect achieved through enforcement actions motivates regulated entities to seek compliance assistance and use incentive policies; (9) differences between EPA and state regulatory authorities were exacerbated by inconsistent approaches by different EPA offices on how the adequacy of state enforcement programs should be assessed; and (10) EPA could more effectively help states deal with some of the technical barriers impeding their efforts to develop measures needed to implement results-oriented enforcement strategies.