EPA enforcement at a crossroads

Environmental enforcement policy in the US is at a crossroads today, faced with a choice of two competing approaches for achieving the country's environmental goals. On the one hand is the federal government's current push to beef up enforcement of environmental laws by increasing the severity of criminal sanctions and general enforcement activities. On the other hand is the growing trend in many environmental regulations to incentivize voluntary compliance by encouraging pollution prevention and self-auditing. Although these two approaches are not inherently incompatible, there is growing concern that the government's current emphasis on criminal enforcement may severely undermine the goal of voluntary compliance by creating an overly adversarial relationship between government and industry and by placing corporate managers at risk of incurring personal liability when they attempt to ferret out environmental compliance problems.