Editor’s Note: The complete GAO report, “Environmental Regulation: EPA Should Improve Adherence to Guidance for Selected Elements of Regulatory Impact Analyses,” GAO-14-519: Published: Jul 18, 2014. Publicly Released: Aug 11, 2014 is available here. GAO explains in the report that “OMB guidance states that RIAs should enable a third party to understand how the agency arrived at its estimates and conclusions…. However, in the Lead Opt-Out RIA, EPA neither included nor made readily apparent the support for certain benefit estimates in the RIA document, nor did it clearly explain in the RIA the rationale for the regulatory option it chose. Further, in the CISWI RIA, EPA…did not explain the rationale for selecting an alternative that did not yield the greatest net benefits.”
From: The Hill
A government report made public Monday finds fault with the Environmental Protection Agency’s analyses of the costs and benefits of its regulations.
The Government Accountability Office report concluded that information incorporated into the EPA’s Regulatory Impact Analyses (RIA) was sometimes murky.
Additionally, the GAO found that the agency did not always monetize the costs and benefits of proposed actions and that the EPA had estimated effects of its regulations on employment by, in part, using a study that is more than two decades old.
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