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U.S. Environmental Protection Agency	12-P-0253

I"	\ Office of Inspector General	February 6,2012
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At a Glance
Why We Did This Review
The Office of Inspector
General received a request
from the House Committee on
Transportation and
Infrastructure to review the
U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency's (EPA's) steps to
ensure the quality and
consistency of oil spill
prevention and response plans,
and to review how EPA tracks
violators under the Clean Water
Act (CWA) Section 311
program.
Background
In 1973, EPA issued the Spill
Prevention, Control, and
Countermeasure (SPCC) Rule
to establish procedures,
methods, and equipment
requirements to prevent oil
discharges from non-
transportation-related facilities.
The SPCC Rule requires
facilities to prepare plans
outlining their spill prevention
procedures and
countermeasures to address the
effects of an oil spill.
For further information, contact
our Office of Congressional and
Public Affairs at (202) 566-2391.
The full report is at:
www.epa.aov/oia/reports/2012/
20120206-12-P-0253.pdf
EPA Needs to Further Improve How It Manages
Its Oil Pollution Prevention Program
What We Found
Although EPA has taken steps to improve its program to prevent oil spills from
known facilities to waters of the United States, the Agency remains largely
unaware of the identity and compliance status of the vast majority of CWA
Section 311 regulated facilities. Effective program management requires EPA to
know the identity and nature of the facilities it is responsible for regulating. EPA
has taken a number of steps to improve the quality and consistency of SPCC
Plans and Facility Response Plans (FRPs). EPA has also improved its ability to
track individual CWA Section 311 violations and violators in a new national
database. However, EPA still does not have knowledge of most facilities it is
responsible for regulating. In addition, Agency data systems cannot exchange
data with each other, and lack consistent and sufficient codes to categorize
deficiencies and noncompliance. These data systems limitations prevent EPA
from capturing the full details of a known violator's history or identifying trends
in compliance and enforcement. As a result, EPA cannot assess the success of
steps it has taken to improve the quality and consistency of SPCC Plans, FRPs, or
the oil pollution prevention program as a whole. Therefore, the Agency is unable
to assess the degree to which its actions will help prevent future oil spills or
mitigate their associated impacts.
What We Recommend
We recommend that the Assistant Administrator for Solid Waste and Emergency
Response, in consultation with the Assistant Administrator for Enforcement and
Compliance Assurance, improve oversight of facilities regulated by EPA's oil
pollution prevention program. Specifically, we recommend that EPA improve
oversight by biennially assessing and reporting on the quality and consistency of
SPCC Plans and FRPs, implementing a risk-based inspection strategy, updating
guidance, and consistently interpreting SPCC and FRP regulations. We further
recommend that the two Assistant Administrators work together to establish a
national oil program database that contains compliance histories for regulated
facilities, can track compliance trends, and exchanges data with other EPA
databases. While the Agency recognized that it could improve the program, it
neither agreed nor disagreed with most of our recommendations. Although the
Agency disagreed with our recommendation regarding consistently interpreting
regulations, we believe the recommendation is valid. In response to Agency
comments, we added the recommendation about biennially assessing the quality
and consistency of plans. All recommendations in this report are unresolved.

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