| January 27, 2003 Vol. 4 No. 2:
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Workshop on EPA's Assessment Factors
A workshop was held on January 21, 2003, to discuss scientific and technical aspects of the appropriateness and utility of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recently developed Draft Assessment Factors for Evaluating the Quality of Information from External Sources. The Assessment Factors represent an additional effort by EPA in response the Data Quality Act. EPA finalized its data quality guidelines in October 2002. These Assessment Factors are intended to represent the types of considerations that EPA takes into account when evaluating the quality of information that is submitted voluntarily to the agency or otherwise obtained by EPA from non-agency sources for potential use in developing a policy or regulatory decision.
The workshop included panel discussions covering epidemiology, toxicology and monitoring. In addition to numerous scientists and academics at the workshop, a wide variety of industry representatives also attended. The industry representatives urged EPA to adopt stricter and more detailed factors along with set procedures for implementing them. Others workshop participants spoke out against creating binding checklists or bureaucratic formulas to evaluate scientific studies. While there will be no National Academy of Sciences report or proceedings from the workshop, a transcript of the meeting will be made available.