DATA QUALITY

Status Of Data Quality Act Petitions
In addition to the three earlier filed Petitions, BMW filed a new Data Quality Act Petition requesting correction of information on several EPA data bases regarding BMW's RCRA compliance. EPA has also initially denied the Chamber of Commerce's Petition. While there has been no formal response to the four Senators' Petition, Administrator Whitman has sent them a discouraging letter regarding it.

• The first Petition requested that EPA's IRIS listing for barium be revised. EPA initially denied this Petition on January 30, 2003. The Petitioner Chemical Products Corporation can now file an administrative appeal.



• The second Petition, filed by CRE and agricultural groups, requested correction of EPA's FIFRA/FQPA environmental risk assessment for atrazine to clarify that there can be no reliable data on atrazine's purported endocrine effects on wildlife until there are properly validated tests for such effects. On January 30, 2003, EPA sent Petitioners a letter which said that EPA will respond to their Petition in EPA's atrazine interim IRED. The IRED, which became available on February 20, granted much of the relief sought by the Petition. The Petitioners are the Triazine Network, the Kansas Corn Growers Association and CRE.



• The Chamber of Commerce filed a petition seeking correction of the minutes for an EPA SAB meeting held on October 1, 2002. In a letter dated March 5, 2003, EPA initially denied the Chamber's Petition on the ground that the SAB was not subject to the Data Quality Act.



• The Competitive Enterprise Institute has filed Data Quality Petitions with NOAA and OSTP related to global climate change. The CEI Petitions seek withdrawal of the National Assessment on Climate Change, which is the inter-agency technical document that underlies most of the federal Government's recent statements about global climate change.



• Four US Senators have also filed a petition to EPA regarding NPDES for Oil and Gas Construction Activity. EPA has not formally acted yet on the Senators' Petition. However, in a letter dated March 7, 2002, Ambassador Whitman disagreed with most of the flawed data arguments in their Petition. EPA has also published the final rule in question, and the Senators' Petition had requested that the final rule not be published.



• BMW's Petition requests correction of EPA's Enforcement Compliance History Online database; EPA's Sector Facility Indexing Project database; and other EPA compliance databases. BMW claims that these databases erroneously show BMW as being in Significant Non-Compliance (SNC) with RCRA. BMW claims that these SNC listings for it are based only on alleged violation of an EPA guidance memorandum which is now being judicially reviewed by the D.C. Circuit.