Consumer Product Safety Commission

To establish a flammability standard for chairs, sofas, and other upholstered furniture, the Consumer Product Safety Commission quantifies the fire hazards using (1) national estimates of the total number of fires in four general categories and the extent of losses that do not reflect specific types of fires, such as those from upholstered furniture, and (2) detailed information about specific types of fires within a portion of all U.S. fires. At present, the Commission cannot ensure that its methodology provides a complete picture of the national fire losses that the potential standard would address because, among other things, (1) it has not developed a statement of precision for the estimated losses from upholstered furniture fires and therefore cannot disclose the range of the standard's possible benefits and (2) its methodology for calculating fire losses has the effect of including losses that the standard is not likely to address, such as losses from fires that are intentionally set. GAO recommends that as the Commission continues to consider the need for a mandatory flammability standard for upholstered furniture, it do more analyses to identify the level of imprecision in its methodology's fundamental assumptions and apply any necessary revisions to its cost-benefit analysis.

GAO noted that: (1) because no single national data source exists on the magnitude of hazards and losses caused by upholstered furniture fires, CPSC blends information from two different sources; (2) one source provides national estimates on the total number of fires in four general categories and the extent of losses, but it provides no information about specific types of fires, such as upholstered furniture fires; (3) the second source provides detailed information for specific types of fires, but for only a portion of all fires in the United States; (4) CPSC uses the details from the second source of data and the national estimates from the first source to calculate national estimates of fire losses from the kinds of upholstered furniture fires the standard would address; (5) CPSC cannot ensure that its methodology provides a complete picture of the national fire losses that the potential standard would address; (6) CPSC does not develop a statement of precision for the estimated losses from upholstered furniture fires; (7) without this, CPSC's estimates of fire losses do not adequately disclose the range of benefits that may be associated with its potential standard; (8) CPSC's methodology for calculating fire losses has the effect of including losses that are not likely to be addressed by the standard; (9) fire losses involving upholstered furniture are counted even though other factors not addressed by the standard may have been responsible, such as fires that are intentionally set; (10) also, for those fires for which the cause or origin is unknown, CPSC assumes that upholstered furniture fires will occur in the same proportion they occur in fires with a known cause; (11) GAO's testing shows that these methods are likely to substantially overstate fire losses that the standard would address, and as a result, they could have a material effect on the associated benefits expected from the potential standard; and (12) various analyses can be used to assess the validity of underlying assumptions and ultimately strengthen CPSC estimates, but so far CPSC has not used them.

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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