NY Water Testing Company Falsified Thousands Of Samples, Prospered For Years Under Lax Regulations
SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Even after armed federal investigators raided its offices in 2010 and the New York Department of Health suspended its state certification in early 2012, Upstate Laboratories Inc. continued its lucrative business of testing water samples from landfills and wastewater treatment plants across the state.
Officially, state environmental regulators will not accept test results from labs the DOH has not certified. The rule is fundamental to the integrity of the program that was designed to protect the state’s waterways from industrial pollution. Yet the state Department of Environmental Conservation kept accepting Upstate’s test results for more than a year after DEC managers learned of the suspension and wrote emails saying the results should be rejected.
On the morning of February 27, 2012, the DOH notified the DEC that it had suspended Upstate Labs. A few hours later, Jason Fagel, an official at the DEC’s Division of Water, emailed other DEC managers: “For any regulatory entity that your division may oversee, like landfills, they should not be using Upstate to report monitoring results to DEC. If you notice this happening, DOH would like to know about it.”
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Four months later, on July 17, federal prosecutors in Syracuse announced that Upstate had pled guilty to one felony count of mail fraud related to the falsification of more than 3,300 laboratory test results from 2008 through 2010. The company agreed to pay a criminal fine of $150,000 and restitution to victims, as determined by the court. The fine may be waived if the restitution total exceeds the amount of the fine. The plea agreement stated that Upstate employees had routinely back-dated sample results to make it appear that analyses had occurred within required time periods when they had not. It cited 31 public and private clients affected by the tainted Upstate tests, ranging from trailer parks and pizza restaurants to villages and towns to county waste divisions and landfills to the state Department of Transportation. Although prosecutors didn’t mention it, even the DEC’s Division of Environmental Remediation had awarded Upstate a $1 million contract.
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http://www.dcbureau.org/201311209337/natural-resources-news-service/tainted-water-testing-lab-flourished-under-lax-new-york-state-regulators.html
