Abstract |
This report covers Fiscal Year 2007 Superfund activity of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Inspector General (OIG). The Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986 requires the OIG to annually audit the Superfund program and report the results to Congress. We found several ways EPA can improve its management of Superfund resources and free up funds for better use. We identified funding on Superfund cooperative agreements that could be deobligated in both New York and New Jersey. New York could have deobligated $486,744 on a project that had been frequently amended since 1987. For New Jersey, although EPA had identified $9.1 million for deobligation in November 2005 as part of its Fiscal Year 2006 deobligation plan, it had still not deobligated those amounts as of September 2006. In another review, we noted that EPA missed an opportunity to make timely and better use of $2.8 million in the special account for the Thermo Chem Superfund site in Michigan. The Agency could have funded other priority response activities by reclassifying the funds no longer needed at that site. |