The National Public Water Systems Compliance Report for 2003 describes how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its state and tribal partners are meeting the goal of ensuring that Americans receive safe drinking water from public water systems. Some of the ways that EPA measures attaining this goal is to track the number of public water systems that may not be meeting health-based drinking water standards, or monitoring and reporting requirements. In 2003 94% of America's public water systems reported no violations of a health-based drinking water standard. EPA prepares a National Public Water Systems Compliance Report for every calendar year. This report uses calendar year, which is from January through December, while other reports or databases may use the fiscal year which is from October through September. The report is an annual summary of reported violations at the nation's public water systems. This report also discusses the data we use to measure our success and the progress we are making in our efforts to increase data reliability and completeness. The report also summarizes and evaluates annual reports prepared by the states. The first part of this report provides a national picture of the public water system compliance using data from the Safe Drinking Water Information System/Federal Version (SDWIS). SDWIS is the national database where states and tribes with primacy report annually to EPA violations of the maximum contaminant levels, treatment techniques, significant monitoring and reporting, significant consumer notification, variance and/or exemptions. EPA aggregates these reported violations at all public water systems in states, commonwealths, territories and in Indian country to present a national summary of violations, and then presents summaries of significant monitoring and reporting violations, significant public notification violations, and violations of health-based standards at the different kinds of public water systems. The second part of this report presents information on public water systems in Indian country. A glossary of terms used in this report appears in Appendix A. Summaries and evaluations of completeness of the states annual public water systems reports for 2003 are presented in Appendix B.

"September 2005." "EPA 305-R-05-002." Cover title.