The Environmental Protection Agency under President Bush has overstated its success in fighting polluters by lumping counterterrorism and narcotics cases led by other agencies into its environmental enforcement record, a Bee investigation has found.
* Puffed up the number of criminal investigations it initiated.
* Overreported the number of cases it referred to federal prosecutors.
* Padded the length of prison terms served for environmental crimes.
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The performance inflation masks a significant drop-off in the federal government's pursuit of criminal polluters during the past two years, according to interviews with EPA agents and officials, analyses of EPA enforcement statistics and reviews of internal agency records.
"We were encouraged to... find anything that's got any breath to it and put a case number on it," one senior agent said. "We were approaching the end of a fiscal year. They wanted to make it look like a good year."
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As of last October, EPA referrals to federal prosecutors had fallen 29 percent from what they were two years earlier under Clinton, according to Justice Department data compiled by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University research group. Referrals for the first half of the current federal fiscal year show no sign of increase.
