Price Waterhouse LLP says U.S. companies would conduct more environmental audits if they were assured the results would not be used to penalize them.
A Price Waterhouse survey of 369 companies, including oil and chemical firms, found nearly two thirds of the companies that perform environmental audits would expand such programs if penalties were eliminated for problems the companies themselves identified, reported, and corrected.
Among the companies that do not perform audits, 20% fear audit information could be somehow be used against them. The Environmental Protection Agency recently issued an interim policy that will ease, and in some cases eliminate, penalties for companies that voluntarily disclose audit findings.
FURTHER FINDINGS
Price Waterhouse said 75% of the companies it surveyed perform environmental audits. Of those, 9% said their audit findings had been involuntarily discovered or disclosed, and 12% said audit results they had provided voluntarily had been used for enforcement against them.
The survey found 90% of the firms that conduct audits said they do so for good business or environmental assurance reasons or because they wish to improve the company's overall environmental management program. The rest perform audits in response to a 1986 EPA auditing policy statement.
Most of the companies that do not conduct environmental audits said their products and processes do not have significant environmental effects.
MANAGEMENT'S RESPONSE
The Compliance Management and Policy Group, a coalition of major companies and trade associations, said the Price Waterhouse study confirms what it has known all along: "Current environmental enforcement policies discourage more voluntary action by companies."
The coalition said internal environmental audits are most valuable when a company knows it will be able to act on the audit's findings without being punished after the fact by a government agency
"The Price Waterhouse survey shows there would be less resistance within companies to sufficiently fund the programs if the risk of punishment were not there. More resources would go toward compliance assurance."
The group said EPA!s interim policy is a step in the right direction, "but it has such narrow coverage that good companies will continue to be punished for being good. Meanwhile, chronic violators go unpunished.
Bills are awaiting action in Congress to limit EPA's ability to punish companies that voluntarily conduct audits, then correct and disclose violations.
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