Superfund

System Enhancements Could Improve the Efficiency of Cost Recovery Gao ID: AIMD-95-177 August 25, 1995

Under the Superfund program, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for recovering from responsible parties billions in costs associated with cleaning up the worst hazardous waste sites. In 1992 and again in 1995, GAO cited the Superfund as a "high-risk" government program and noted that EPA lacked the information needed to adequately management and support is cost recovery efforts. EPA's cost recovery effort is supported by several financial and records management systems. Because of limitations in these systems, cost recovery staff cannot fully depend on the system to provide all the information needed for cost recovery. Instead, staff must do excessive manual searches and reconciliations to ensure that the information supporting cost recovery cases is accurate, reliable, and complete. EPA is aware of these limitations and has taken steps to address them. For example, planned modifications to the financial systems should produce more detailed cost data, thus reducing manual reconciliation efforts. GAO notes additional measures that EPA could take to ensure that its systems provide the best possible support for its cost recovery efforts.

GAO found that: (1) EPA financial and records management systems do not provide all the detailed cost information EPA staff need for the Superfund cost recovery process; (2) EPA staff have to conduct excessive manual searches and reconciliations to gather the needed data, which prolongs the cost recovery process; (3) EPA financial management systems are not sophisticated enough to cope with the complexity of certain transactions and the data contained in the systems are not always accurate; (4) EPA internal controls to prevent inaccurate data entry are inadequate and undocumented; and (5) although planned information systems modifications will improve cost information collection and retrieval, EPA needs to do more to enhance its records management capabilities.

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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