Archived Evaluation Reports: Enforcement and Compliance Assurance
For each report below, you will find the title, the year it was commissioned, the office it is affiliated with, a short description of the content and for some, a fact sheet (i.e., a condensed version of the report).
| Year | Office | Report & Fact sheet | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | Office of Policy; Region 1 |
EPA provides compliance assistance to the regulated community, including local governments and tribes, to help their regulatory obligations and to prevent violations. For example, EPA offers compliance assistance to help the auto body sector better understand their responsibilities in following established environmental rules. To achieve this, technical assistance ranging from newsletters, workshops, a help-line and mailings is offered. To assess the combined effectiveness of those activities, the validity of using a telephone survey to replace site visits, and the relative contributions of each assistance activity on compliance rates. The primary goal of this evaluation is to understand the contribution of EPA's Compliance Assistance (CA) effort to improved environmental management and environmental benefits and to establish a statistically valid design methodology that will allow statistical estimation of this impact. This evaluation, managed by the Office of Policy's Evaluation Support Division, is focused on supporting EPA compliance assistance efforts to: (1) implement an outcome measurement pilot for compliance assistance activities conducted in FY09/10 that uses statistically valid methods and an OMB-approved ICR for data collection; (2) investigate through a comprehensive literature review analysis, the nature and extent of any correlation between compliance assistance (CA) activities and changes in recipient behavior (i.e., improved environmental management practices and reduction/elimination/treatment of pollution); and (3) develop and refine an evaluation methodology that has transferable elements so that future, routine CA activities may be measured and evaluated using statistically-valid methodologies but with less complexity and required resources than the pilot (e.g., transferable data collection methods and survey questions). This latter task will include assessing the accuracy of telephone survey information as a substitute for site visits. The study evaluated an approach for assessing attribution for compliance assistance, and the applicability of this approach to both the larger compliance assistance program and to Agency programs that want to attribute specific outcomes to other similar Agency actions (e.g., pollution prevention and waste minimization programs). |
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| 2008 | Region 7 |
Evaluation of the Effectiveness of an Ethanol Compliance Manual |
The evaluation determined how effective the Ethanol Manual and other compliance assistance tools have been in improving industry compliance, and how Region 7 can be most effective in providing compliance assistance to the biofuels industry. |
| 2005 | Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assistance | Evaluation of EPA's National Enforcement Training Institute | This evaluation determined whether NETI is meeting its stated mission of developing a highly skilled and professional enforcement and compliance workforce, which is the underpinning to a successful compliance assurance and enforcement program and, 2) determined how OECA can better directly measure NETI's contribution to OECA's GPRA goal. |
| 2004 | Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assistance | Evaluation of the OECA/ECOS State Review Framework in Pilot States | The evaluation assessed the State Review Framework (a tool designed to ensure a fair and consistent level of core enforcement across the country). |