Summary

To protect consumers from "unreasonable risk of injury," the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) oversees about 15,000 consumer goods, ranging from kitchen appliances and children's toys to hot tubs and garage door openers. CPSC enforces existing federal consumer product regulations but also develops projects to assess products with hazards not covered by existing regulations. These projects may prompt CPSC to issue new regulations, assist in the development of voluntary industry standards, or provide information to consumers on how to use a product safely. Although CPSC has developed criteria to help select new projects, with the agency's current data, these criteria can be measured only imprecisely if at all. Some CPSC criteria for projects evaluating hazardous products, such as numbers of deaths or injuries caused by these products, are based on incomplete or inaccurate information. Because CPSC does not maintain comprehensive records on past or ongoing projects, it is hard to monitor current projects or to assess the need for new projects in different hazard areas. On a related matter, CPSC has established procedures to implement statutory requirements restricting the release of manufacturer-specific information. The intent of these requirements is to minimize the possibility that a product might be unfairly disparaged. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress; see: Consumer Product Safety Commission: Better Data Needed to Help Identify and Analyze Potential Hazards, by Carlotta C. Joyner, Director of Education and Employment Issues, before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade and Consumer Protection, House Committee on Commerce. GAO/T-HEHS-98-23, Oct. 23, 1997.

GAO noted that: (1) although CPSC has established criteria to help select new projects, with the agency's current data these criteria can be measured only imprecisely, if at all; (2) although CPSC has described itself as "data driven," its information on product-related injuries and deaths is often sketchy; (3) this makes it more difficult not only for agency management to monitor current projects but also for staff and commissioners to assess and prioritize the need for new projects in different hazard areas; (4) CPSC has insufficient data on both internal agency efforts and external product hazards to assess the impact and cost of each project; (5) to help evaluate alternative methods of addressing potential hazards, CPSC may perform a risk assessment to estimate the likelihood of injury associated with a hazard or conduct a cost-benefit analysis to assess the potential effects of a proposed regulation; (6) although CPSC does not complete either a risk assessment or cost-benefit analysis for every project, the agency conducts these analyses more often than it is required to by law; (7) nevertheless, CPSC's data are often insufficient to support a thorough application of these analytical techniques; (8) to evaluate relative risks, it is usually necessary to have information on how many consumers use the product--information that CPSC frequently does not have; (9) risk assessment of consumer products requires measurement of the number of harmful incidents; (10) CPSC's imprecise and incomplete death and injury data make risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis at best less reliable and at worst impossible to do; (11) the cost-benefit analyses conducted by CPSC between 1990 and 1996 were often not comprehensive; (12) CPSC has established procedures to implement statutory requirements concerning the release of manufacturer-specific information; (13) when releasing information to the public that identifies a specific manufacturer, CPSC is required to verify the information and allow the manufacturer an opportunity to comment; (14) evidence from the industry and from legal cases suggests that CPSC has met its statutory requirements in this area; (15) individuals within CPSC, as well as some industry representatives and consumer groups, expressed dissatisfaction with the requirements of this law; and (16) some of these individuals have proposed statutory changes that range from reducing to expanding the current requirements.