There are certain things you should do before the inspector arrives.

You should conduct your own internal audit to make sure you are in compliance with environmental regulations. Check your hazardous waste labels to make sure all the fields are filled in – especially the accumulation start date. That is the date when the first drop of hazardous waste went into your container in your central storage area – assuming you do not have a satellite accumulation area.

Make sure your weekly inspection checklist of your waste storage area is up-to-date. If you have environmental plans that call for scheduled inspections, make sure your inspection logs are current and up-to-date.

Check to make sure all your manifests are in order and are filed in chronological order.

Here is a critical point to remember: If you discover any non-compliance issues during your internal audit, you fix them right away. DO NOT document your non-compliance in a memo and send it to everyone under the sun including the night janitor and the security guard. There is NO need for that.

The purpose of your internal audit is to find problem areas and fix them before the inspector arrives. You do NOT want to create a paper trail of your non-compliance issues. There is no need for that.

For more details on what to do before, during and after an inspection, take a look at my 340-page Practical compliance book.

If you are interested in our next webinar on How to Manage an Agency Inspection scheduled for June 18, 2026 from 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Eastern Time, sign up here. The cost is only $85. You will learn what to do before, during and after an EPA or OSHA inspection. You will get a PDF document summarizing all the points discussed during the webinar and a Certificate of Completion. As an attendee, you are also eligible for one hour of private consultation via email .with Norman Wei

First of all, do not allow yourself to be intimidated.

Do not let anyone tell you that because you are not an attorney, you cannot talk intelligently about environmental liabilities. You do not need a law degree from Harvard Law School to understand that falsifying records under the Clean Water Act is a crime. You also don’t have to be an auto mechanic or mechanical engineer to drive a four-ton SUV.

As in the case of hiring outside legal counsels, don’t hire big law firms to work on small legal cases. If you do, you will end up paying $200 per hour for some young lawyer to learn on the job under the supervision of a $800 per hour law partner.

In most corporations, it is the in-house counsel who chooses which outside law firm to retain. But that does not mean you should cede your role and responsibilities entirely and turn your case over to your legal team. You should work very closely with the legal team since you are the environmental manager and you know all the underlying facts about the case. Insist that you be involved in the discussions of strategies. Better yet, lead the discussions on strategies.

Remember – you not only know the technical issues, you also know the folks at the agency. Since legal strategies inevitably involve relationships between your company (represented by you) and the agency, it makes good management sense that you be involved in the discussions. Any good attorney will understand that. If you don’t insist, you will be relegated to a mere “technician” – a “janitor in a suit” in the eyes of your legal counsel.

The best way to ensure a meaningful role within your legal team is to develop a professional rapport with your in-house counsel. You do that by keeping your company attorney up-to-date on pending environmental issues at your plants. Don’t call your attorney only when you have a big legal problem. Invite the attorney to visit your plant before problems arise. If you know one of your in-house counsels is visiting a plant, try to schedule a brief walk through with the attorney and review some of the on-going environmental issues.

Your in-house counsel will manage outside counsel. You don’t need to be concerned about that but keep in mind that all outside law firms exist to bill clients.

Here is a funny but sad story I had while working in a multi-national corporation. I attended a meeting with several of my vice presidents at a large law firm in Puerto Rico. This was one of those law firms with internal spiral staircases, mahogany wall panels, marble flooring and corridors that resemble a fine arts museum – all paid for by their clients. One of the VPs made the mistake of asking a law partner a simple environmental question. The partner said: “Let us do some legal research on it and get back to you”. A month later our accounting department received an invoice from the law firm for 14 hours of legal research (at $400 per hour). I was horrified and immediately faxed a short paragraph to the law partner requesting the results of the “legal research” and to cease work on any further research. Not only did I not get the “research” results, I received an additional invoice for $200 (minimum charge unit of 15 minutes) for reading my “stop work” fax. A true story.

The above is an excerpt from my 400-page Practical Compliance Guide available at my website.

There are two types of environmental audits and they achieve two different results.

Compliance audit. This type of audit only gives you a snap shot of your compliance status at the time when the audit is performed. You are basically asking the question: “Is anything wrong here today?” It tells you nothing about the future. This is like getting your annual physical examination. Your doctor can tell you what ails you on the day of the examination. He can’t predict whether you will live long enough to come back a year later.

When you do a compliance audit, you look at physical things such as:

Evidence of past spills such as discoloration of soil and vegetation housekeeping
Hazardous waste drum conditions and labels
Accumulation start date on the waste drum label
Secondary containment in oil storage area
Sufficient aisle space between drums in storage area

You review records such as:

Hazardous waste manifests
Solvent usages as required by air permits
Discharge monitoring reports for waste water treatment plants
Employee training records
Inspection logs

EPA has many audit protocols you can use when you are doing a compliance audit. For example, EPA has published audit protocols on the following:

Hazardous waste generators
Universal wastes and Used Oil
Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act
Superfund
Underground Storage Tanks
Risk Management Plan under the Clean Air Act

You should also look for checklist from your state and local agencies. Most state agencies have inspection and compliance checklists that you can use for your own compliance audits. Just go to their websites and download them for free.

Management audit. In this type of audit, you review the corporate structure and people. You are asking the question: “What happens when something goes wrong tomorrow?” The analogy is when your doctor has a lengthy discussion with you about your life style. He is going to ask you how much do you drink, how much red meat do you eat, how often do you smoke and how many hours of exercise you get a week. He is examining your life style. After an extensive discussion with you nd after reviewing your test results, he should be able to tell with some certainly if you will live long enough to visit him a year later.
What do you look for in an Environmental Management Audit? You look at things such as:

1. Management structure. You look at how the management structure is set up to handle environmental issues. You look to see who is responsible for doing what. And you also try to find out the attitude of the people responsible for environmental compliance.
2. Staffing level/capability. You determine whether the company has provided sufficient support and financial resources to the environmental staff.
3. Response capability. You find out if the environmental staff has the capability to handle emergencies.You determine if they have the experience and knowledge to do their job. One of the most important things to look for is whether they know enough to ask the right questions and seek outside help.
4. Plant ownership. You find out if the people at the plant level have ownership of their environmental plans. For example, you want to find out if they have been involved in the development of Spill Prevention and Control Countermeasures (SPCC), storm water pollution prevention plan, or RCRA Contingency Plan.
5. Relationship with regulatory agencies. This is by far the most important aspect of an environmental management audit. You want to find out if the plant manger has good working relationship with the local regulatory agencies. His attitude will permeate down the entire organization through the staff who report directly to him. If the answer is no, you have a ticking time bomb on your hands.

In a management audit, you always ask open ended questions. These are questions that cannot be answered with a yes or no. Here are some examples:

Who is responsible for developing the contingency plan?
What management level signs off on the plan?
Who decides when the plan should be changed?
What specific training does that person have?How do you manage your wastes?
When do you alert your senior management about an environmental issue?
Why do you do it this way?
How do you ensure that your waste transporter and TSDF are licensed?
Where do you keep your manifests?
What systems are in place to determine waste characterization?
Who decides what a solid waste is ?
Who decides what a hazardous waste is?
How often do you review environmental performance?
How do you know that you have an environmental problem?
How are you getting along with the agencies?
What training do you provide for your staff handling hazardous wastes?
Who is accountable for environmental performance at the plant level?

When doing an environmental management audit, the five questions that an auditor should always ask are the who, what, when, how and why. All of these are open-ended questions – questions that cannot be answered with a yes or no answer.

The above is an excerpt from my 400-page Practical Environmental Compliance Guide – a Blueprint for Environmental Managers available at my website.

1. If at all possible, try to prepare your environmental plans yourself. This is the best way to ensure you and your staff have ownership of the plans. There are numerous guidance documents on EPA’s website on how to prepare SPCC plans, SWPPP and RCRA contingency plans. These are the same documents your consultants use to prepare your plan.
2. If you must use outside consultant to prepare your plans for you, do not allow the consultant to prepare the plans in total isolation without any input from you or your staff. At a minimum, make sure the consultant meets with those who will be implementing the plan. That is the only way your plant personnel will have ownership of the plan. Without such ownership, nothing will happen and the plan will most likely not be implemented as written. Remember: we don’t wash our rental cars because we don’t own them.
3. Remember that you no longer need a Professional Engineer’s certification in a SPCC plan if you do not have more than 10,000 gallons of shell capacity on site. You can now do self certification under a new SPCC rule.
4. Make sure that you are comfortable with the inspection and training schedules that your consultant puts in the plan. Why? Because you are going to be the one implementing it – not your consultant. Make sure your consultant does not over-promise something in your plan. For example, your consultant may commit you to a daily inspection schedule just to make your plan look good on paper when a weekly or biweekly schedule would suffice. They won’t be doing the inspection. Your staff will. Committing to an overly aggressive plan is a common consulting mistake.
5. Do not be overly ambitious in your plan. Only commit to what you can deliver. Words are cheap – it is easy to talk about what you plan to do because they are just words on a piece of paper. You want to make sure you can actually deliver it. The inspector will want to see if you keep your promise.
6. Start putting a training program together as soon as your plan is written up. Set a schedule to do the training and make sure you document all your training efforts.
7. As soon as you finish writing the plan, you must think about implementing it. Many people think that their work is done once a plan has been written by their consultants. In fact, their work has just started. Most of these plans – especially the SPCC and SWPPP – are made up of two parts: plan preparation and implementation of the plan. The only way you can demonstrate that you are actually implementing your plan is to show the EPA inspector copies of completed inspection checklists and training records.

The main point to remember about most the environmental plans is that they are performance-based. In other words, after you have prepared the plans, you are expected to perform!

This is an excerpt from my 400-page Practical Compliance Guide available here.

Society has taken certain actions to manage these risks. We establish speed limits and impose traffic rules to minimize the chance of cars crashing into each other. We require buildings to meet certain codes to keep them from collapsing during an earthquake. We created the Transportation Safety Agency to screen all passengers going on planes. All of these actions are part of risk management.

Companies also manage risks at various levels. For example, corporate risk managers work with insurance companies and fire departments to reduce the risk of their factories burning down. Safety managers set up machine guards to prevent amputations. They establish lockout/tagout procedures to reduce the risk of employees being electrocuted.

Environmental Risks

What about the environmental managers? How should we go about managing environmental risks?

The first thing we need to recognize is that environmental risks involve more than the risk of being fined by the government for permit violations.

We as environmental managers need to think outside the box.

We need to embrace change. Always be suspicious when somebody says “we have always done it this way” as a reason to resist change.

The old adage: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is true only up to a certain point. If we had taken this adage to heart during the horse and buggy days, we would still be riding to work in a horse drawn buggy because the buggy was never broken. It got us from point A to point B most of the time.

To think outside the box, we should look at chemicals that we use at the factory and ask these questions:

What are the risks to our workers when they use these chemicals?
What risks do these chemicals pose to the environment if they are spilled?
Are we storing too much of these chemicals on site at any given time?

We should look at the amount of hazardous wastes that we store onsite and ask the following questions:

1. What are the environmental risks associated with storing all those highly ignitable hazardous wastes on-site even though they may be within the legal limits of 90/180/270 days?
   
2. Should we ship them out more frequently so as to reduce the risk of fire and spillage onsite?

These are all important environmental risk management questions we as environmental professionals need to ask ourselves.

When we do an environmental audit, we should never rely solely on a simple checklist.

We should look around us and try to recognize risks. For example, if we see a deteriorating water tank right next to a transformer substation, a flashing red sign saying “HIGH RISK” should light up in our heads. We should immediately recognize that risk because when that water tank collapses, our factory will be out of commission for a long time.

Another example to consider environmental risk management relates to chemical reformulation. There is a simple reason why air regulations are constantly reducing the allowable amount of Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) in our cleaning solvents. The regulatory agencies are trying to encourage industry to switch to a more environmentally friendly solvent. Reformulation is an excellent way to reduce environmental risks.

Many paint shops have escaped the clutches of Title V air permits simply by reformulating their paints. They now use paints that contain much less Hazardous Air Pollutants and VOC and that takes them below the Title V permitting threshold. So by getting out of Title V permitting system, they significantly reduce the risk of citizen lawsuits and running afoul of Title V’s onerous compliance certification requirements.

It saves them money and headaches.

The last and very important way to reduce our environmental risks is to make sure that all our employees receive the proper training that they need so that they know what to do in case of an emergency. They need to know enough to ask the right questions or to ask for help. They also need to know why they are doing the things that they do and not just because someone told them.

A good auditor will always look for answer to this question: “How will they deal with it when something really bad happens?”

That is the ultimate test for environmental risk assessment and it should be on the mind of every environmental manager.

For a copy of my 400-page PRACTICAL environmental compliance guide, go to this link.

Let’s see how we can learn from other people’s mistakes.

Based on the investigation reports of several major chemical accidents, here are some of the most common causes contributing to the accidents:

Improper storage of chemicals. A company in Arkansas stored Azinphos methyl – AZM 50W (a pesticide) next to a hot compressor discharge pipe despite specific warnings on the Material and Safety data Sheet (MSDS). Under the Storage Section of the MSDS, it states that AZM is to be stored “in a well ventilated, dry place away from heat (>100 F) and other sources of ignition” This warning was ignored and the pesticide subsequently decomposed and caused a major chemical accident in May 1997 that killed three fire fighters. Hundreds of residents nearby had to be evacuated. This was a classic case of failure to check the MSDS prior to storage.

Lack of standard operating procedures to handle hazardous chemicals. A 5700 gallons tank containing hydrochloric acid ruptured in April 1997 and caused the evacuation of a 10-block area near the company in Albany, New York. Twenty people were hospitalized. Subsequent investigation showed that the company did not have any standard operating procedures for off-loading of acids. It also stored hydrochloric acid and sodium hypochlorite in close proximity. The company also failed to follow the “Responsible Distribution Process” prepared by the National Association of Chemical Distributor of which it was a member.

Lack of hazard analysis prior to startup. In a major refinery accident in 1997 when an explosion caused a fire that burned for 10 hours and affected the entire community in Texas, it was determined that the company did not have an adequate hazardous analysis system for its compressed gas system and that the operators did not have procedures to deal with emergencies.

Insufficient training of employees who handle hazardous chemicals. In 1998, two explosions at a chemical plant in Nevada killed four workers and injured six others. The joint EPA/OSHA investigation report concluded that “poor management and worker training led to a lack of knowledge of the hazards involved in manufacturing explosive.”

Lack of employee ownership in developing environmental plans. This was also cited as another cause of the chemical accident in Nevada in 1998. Employees were not involved in developing or conducting process safety activities. This resulted in a lack of understanding of the process hazards and controls by the workers. When employees have no ownership of an environmental plan, they are not likely to implement it. That is because they either don’t understand the plan or they just don’t care. NEVER farm out your environmental plans to outside consultants. They will just write up a thick report with pretty cover and it will just sit on your plant manager’s book shelve. Remember – consultants get paid by the pound and they don’t care if you implement the plan as long as they get paid.

For a copy of my 400-page book on Practical Environmental Compliance – a Blueprint for environmental managers, go to this link.

Skill set #1. Knowledge of environmental regulations is important in ensuring compliance. There is a myriad of environmental regulations and the managers must understand how they affect the operation of their company. The managers must also recognize what they do not know and have the smarts to get help from experts.

Skill Set #2. The managers must have the right temperament to work on difficult issues with regulatory agencies. They need to understand that dealings with regulatory agencies are a two-way street and often require both parties to arrive at a mutually satisfactory solution. It is a long process of negotiation. The managers must also be able to work cordially with plant personnel – with firm and fair hands. They need to know how to work with corporate attorneys. There is a time and place for getting attorneys involved in environmental issues. Attorneys look at environmental issues very differently. It is also critical for environmental managers to understand how senior management sees their roles within the organization.

Skill set #3. It is important for environmental managers to be able to communicate effectively to colleagues at work and at conferences. Convincing people to do things their way requires excellent verbal and written skills. They must also know how to present or sell ideas to senior management. Here is a blog on how to make effective presentations.

Skill Set #4. From the standpoint of enforcement and liability, it is paramount that the environmental managers understand the criteria the governments use to select targets for criminal prosecution. They need to understand the criteria governments use to determine which companies are to be investigated. They also need to understand what to do before, during and after an agency inspection.

Skill set #5. Corporate managers must know how to hire and fire consultants. Consultants can often make or break an organization since they represent the company. If they hire a consultant that is antagonistic to the staff at the permitting agencies, they are not likely to get a good outcome in their permitting process. It is human nature, people generally do not like to work with antagonistic people.

For a copy of my 400-page book on Practical Environmental Compliance – a Blueprint for environmental managers, go to this link.

The BIG difference is in how these corporate mangers are viewed by senior management.

If the safety manager is doing his/her job, the number of employees suffering workplace injuries would be reduced drastically. That in turn reduces the amount of money the company has to pay out through Workmen’s Compensation. So every month, the corporate management board sees how much money they are saving on the bottom line. They see a TANGIBLE return on investing in safety programs every month.

On the environment side, senior management does NOT see any return on investment every month. The environmental manager may be saving the company millions of dollars in environmental penalties but that is invisible to senior management. The only time management hears about environmental issues is when the company is being hit with a multi-million dollar fines. They don’t hear about how the environmental programs have prevented the company from being fined.

So the environmental manager is very much like the homeland security guy trying to prevent a terrorist attack. The taxpayers only hear about his failure after a single attack. They never hear about how he has successfully prevented hundreds of attacks.

Such big difference often leads to huge discrepancies between how the safety and environmental programs are being funded and how the managers are being viewed by management.

An environmental manager would do well by working closely with the safety manager.

The second Trump administration will be different. It will be MUCH worse. Much much worse.

There will be little incentive for companies to comply with existing regulations pertaining to clean air, clean water and hazardous waste disposal. Why?

The Department of Justice and the FBI will likely not take any meaningful enforcement actions against polluters. And even if they do take enforcement action, companies will not be afraid. Why?

Under the recent Supreme Court ruling on Presidential immunity, Trump has total immunity for all actions that fall within “official duty”. So he can literally put up an official “pardon for Sale” sign at the White House and those major corporations being prosecuted by the DOJ (an unlikely event) will just pay his business a couple of million dollars and get a pardon. That will be much cheaper than paying hundreds of millions dollars in fines and having their company officials go to federal prison for environmental crimes.

The political appointees at EPA will also be free to commit any federal crime in furtherance of his objectives because they will all be pardoned by Trump.

Trump has already stated that if some company is willing to invests a billion dollars on a project, it will get a “fast track” to environmental approval. How convenient.

The environmental consulting business will get a huge hit since there will be no incentive for companies to hire consultants to help them stay in compliance.

It will be a shit show for the next 4 years.

1. Ask the inspector for a copy of compliant against your facility. If the inspector shows up as a result of complaints filed against your facility, you can ask about the nature of the compliant. But the inspector will not likely give you the names of the people who filed complaints against you – especially if they are your employees.

2. Restrict inspector’s scope of inspection. An inspector will not allow you to restrict his movement at your facility. If he is doing a general environmental or safety inspection, he has a wide scope as long as the inspection pertains to environmental or safety issues. It is not like a search warrant where the government is restricted to the scope of the search warrant.

3. Stop the inspector from tape recording conversations. Good luck with that. If you try that with an OSHA inspector, it could be considered as “refusal of entry”, according to OSHA’s Field Operations Manual. OSHA inspector has the right to tape conversations, take photos and videotape the inspection.