Next Generation Compliance

• Date: 01 March 2015

3-2015 NEWS & ANALYSIS 45 ELR 10205

A R T I C L E S

Next Generation

Compliance

by Cynthia Giles

Cynthia Giles is the Assistant Administrator for EPA’s

Oce of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.

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is Article is adapted from Chapter One of N

G E C 

E (LeRoy C. Paddock and Jessica A.

Wentz eds.) published in 2014 by ELI Press. e book

emerged from a two-day EPA workshop covering a

broad array of topics, ranging from general compari-

sons of dierent compliance approaches to focused

case studies of regulatory programs. is Article

denes “next generation compliance” and outlines

its ve key elements: rules with compliance built in;

advanced pollution monitoring technologies; elec-

tronic reporting systems; increased transparency; and

innovative enforcement strategies.

William D. Ruckelshaus, the U.S. Environmental

Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) rst administrator,

said that the rst thing he did when he took

the helm in 1970 was le a bunch of lawsuits against the

country’s biggest polluters. He made it clear to everyone

that there was a new sheri in town who was going to take

action to stop the all-too-apparent air and water pollution

plaguing the nation (see Reference 1, below).

Four decades later, violations of pollution standards still

can pose a threat to children with asthma, adults with car-

diovascular disease, people susceptible to waterborne illness,

and all of us exposed to chemicals in our daily lives. And

violations still harm American businesses that are doing the

right thing and should not have to compete with compa-

nies, domestic or foreign, who don’t play by the rules.

While we are justiably proud of the signicant prog-

ress we have made as a nation on the visible violations that

fueled public outrage in the 1960s, big challenges remain.

Today’s problems are pollution not apparent to the naked

eye that still poses real threats to health, the large number

of smaller sources that collectively make a big dierence,

and pollution that isn’t always easily identiable as what

comes from the top of a stack or the end of a pipe. ese

compliance problems require new tools and new thinking.

Environmental compliance today requires a change just a s

dramatic as the one Bill Ruckelshaus led over 40 years ago.

Tough enforcement was a new idea in environmental

protection back in 1970. Today strong criminal and civil

enforcement is—and will continue to be—an essential

part of our environmental protection work. But we can

accomplish even more by moving our compliance pro-

grams into the 21st century (see Reference 2). Just as the

Internet has tra nsformed the way we communicate and

access information, advances in information and emissions

monitoring technology are setting the stage for detection,

processing, and communication capabilities that can revo-

lutionize environmental protection. We are moving toward

a world in which states, EPA, citizens, and industry will

have real-time electronic information regarding environ-

mental conditions, emissions, and compliance, and we are

using what we have learned about compliance to make it

easier to comply than to violate. We call it Next Generation

Compliance, or Next Gen.

I. Rules With Compliance Built In

For yea rs, we have assumed that federal and state agen-

cies would help ensure that we were achieving t he ben-

       

  

Compliance work.

Copyright © 2015 Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, DC. Reprinted with permission from ELR®, http://www.eli.org, 1-800-433-5120.