Why We Did This Report
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General conducted this evaluation to determine whether the EPA’s oversight and implementation of air quality monitoring resulted in underreported air pollution.
Summary of Findings
Our statistical analyses indicate that pollution levels increase when certain air quality monitoring sites are offline. When some ambient air quality monitoring sites were offline, fine particulate matter air pollution increased on average by about 4 percent for daily monitoring sites and 9 percent for 1-in-3 monitoring sites. Further analyses indicated that 35.70 percent of sites that operated intermittently rather than daily had worse air quality on average when they were offline. While the results of our analyses do not indicate malicious behavior at any specific site, they demonstrate that there is a risk of underreported air pollution.
