By Brian Carnell

Sunday, March 9, 2003

The Environmental Protection Agency is concerned about what it perceives as a rise in the number of individuals and laboratories that it is finding are producing fraudulent results for legally required environmental tests.

David Uhlmann, chief of the Justice Department's environmental crimes section, told the Associated Press in January,

In recent years, what has come to our attention is that outside labs are oftentimes in bed with the people who hired them, and conspired to commit environmental crime.

The sorts of fraudulent tests range from test at Superfund sites to determine the severity of pollution at the site, fraudulent water quality tests, and fake tests designed to show that underground gasoline tank storage tanks are not leaking petroleum when, in fact, they are.

But whether there is an increase in such fraud or whether the Justice Department is simply getting better at discovering and prosecuting it is still an open question. Regardless, such fraud undermines the government's ability to monitor existing health problems as well as to formulate reasonable regulations to deal with pollution and other problems.

Source:

Private labs fake environmental tests. Associated Press, January 22, 2003.

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