Superfund Contracts

EPA's Procedures for Preventing Conflicts of Interest Need Strengthening Gao ID: RCED-89-57 February 17, 1989

In response to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the adequacy of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) system for preventing conflicts of interest among its Superfund contractors.

GAO found that: (1) prior to 1988, EPA did little before contract award to determine whether its Superfund contractors had procedures to prevent conflicts of interest; (2) although EPA periodically reviewed its contractors' performance, the reviews did not routinely verify contractor compliance with EPA conflict-of-interest requirements; (3) EPA did not properly document conflict-of-interest cases, case resolutions, or actions on contractor private-party work requests in its contract files, as required; (4) EPA did not provide contractors with specific guidance for avoiding conflicts beyond its regulations and contract clauses; and (5) EPA contracting officers differed on the information they required contractors to include in their private-party work requests, due to lack of formal guidelines and definitive criteria for evaluating contractor requests.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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