Next Generation Compliance

• Author: Cynthia Giles
• Profession: Assistant administrator for EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance
• Pages: 1-22

1

Chapter 1:

Next Generation Compliance

Cynthia Giles*

e most e ective way to achieve compliance with the law is to make it easier to

comply than to violate. EPA is using new technologies and lessons learne d about

what drives compliance to re duce pollution and improve results.

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 c ountry’s biggest polluters. He made it clear to everyone that

there was a new sheri in town who was going to ta ke action to stop the all-

too-apparent air and water pollution plaguing the nation.

Four decades later, violations of pollution standards still can pose a threat

to children with ast hma, adults with cardiovascular disease, people suscep-

tible to waterborne illness, and all of us exposed to chemicals in our daily

lives. And violations stil l harm America n businesses that are doing the right

thing and should not have to compete with companies, domestic or foreign,

who don’t play by the rules.

While we are justiably proud of the signicant progress 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 rea l 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 a nd new thinking. Environmental

compliance today requires a change just as dra matic as the one Bill Ruck-

elshaus 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—a n essential part of our environmental protection work. But we can

accomplish even more by moving our compliance programs into the 21st

* Cynthia Giles is the assistant administrator for EPA’s Oce of Enforcement and Compliance Assur-

ance. Special thanks to David Hindin, who contributed to the ideas described here and is leading

EPA’s Next Generation Compliance work.

2 Next Generation Environmental Compliance and Enforcement

century. Just as the Internet has transformed the way we communicate and

access information, advances in information and emissions monitoring tech-

nology are setting the stage for detection, processing, and communication

capabilities that can revolutionize environmental protection. We are moving

toward a world in which states, EPA, citizens, and industr y will have real-

time electronic information regarding environmental 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 Compli-

ance, or Next Gen.

I. Rules With Compliance Built In

For years, we have assumed that federal and state agencies would help ensure

that we were achieving the benets contemplated in environmental regula-

tions by taking action aga inst violators. Research shows that enforcement

cases do more than just improve compliance by the entity sued; they a lso

deter potential violators and thus improve compliance generally—much as

seeing a speeder getting ticketed tends to slow trac. However, a small num-

ber of federa l and state enforcers cannot eectively police millions of regu-

lated facilities. Wh ile enforcement is an essential part of EPA’s compliance

program, it is not realistic to think that enforcement alone will get us to the

levels of compliance envisioned by our rules.

We can get a bigger bang for the buck by working hard to make sure we

design r ules t hat wi ll work in the real world—rules with compliance built

in. We know a lot about what drives compliance; we need to use that knowl-

edge to structure programs that will work better and be more self-imple-

menting. For example, take reducing emissions from automobiles. ere are

millions of cars and trucks in the United States, each of which is a small

source of harmful emissions that collectively pack a wallop for air quality.

One could imagine the nightmare of requiring each owner to independently

purchase and install air emissions control equipment, then depending on

the government to nd and ticket violators. Instead, we require auto manu-

facturers to install pollution controls when the car is made, and to certify

cars as meeting the standard. For equipment insta llation requirements, gov-

ernment monitors the sma ll number of manufacturers, not the mill ions of

car owners, a nd ca n focus enforcement on those who deliberately circum-

vent the installation standards.

EPA is using this thinking today. In an April 2013 proposed rule requiring

emissions controls for thousands of oil and gas producers, the agency took