Which violations become cases isn’t a matter of leniency or chance. Regulatory agencies operate under long-established policies that guide how they exercise enforcement discretion. These include EPA’s Audit Policy, the Justice Department’s voluntary self-disclosure policy for environmental crimes, and the enforcement response policies that agencies maintain for individual programs. These policies exist partly as a practical necessity. Federal and state regulators identify more potential violations than they have the staff to pursue. Someone has to decide which matters warrant formal action, which can be resolved informally, and which do not require further follow-up.

When I was at EPA, those decisions were routine. The violation itself mattered, but it was rarely the only enforcement consideration. Other factors often weighed as heavily or more: whether the conduct was isolated or part of a pattern, whether violations were repeated, whether anyone made false or misleading statements to regulators, and how the company responded once the problem came to light.

The Off-Ramps Are Embedded in Policies

Certain circumstances and conduct make regulators and prosecutors less likely to pursue enforcement. These “off-ramps” center on five factors that recur in agency policy documents.

1. You found it, and you disclosed it. Under EPA’s Audit Policy, a company that finds a violation through an audit, discloses it within 21 days, and corrects it within 60 days can have 100 percent of the gravity-based penalty waived. That is the punitive portion. EPA still recovers any economic benefit from noncompliance. Most disclosures now go through EPA’s online eDisclosure portal. EPA also generally won’t recommend criminal prosecution of a company that meets the policy’s conditions. The Justice Department’s Environmental Crimes Section applies the same logic in criminal cases through its March 2024 self-disclosure policy. Disclose voluntarily, cooperate fully (including against responsible individuals), and remediate, and absent aggravating factors, prosecutors will not seek criminal charges.

2. You fixed it fast. Since July 2025, OSHA has offered a 15 percent penalty reduction to employers who immediately correct a hazard. EPA’s December 2025 “Compliance First” memo makes timely compliance the main goal of civil enforcement, with formal action reserved for when informal tools don’t work.

3. You had an effective compliance program before the problem. DOJ’s older factors for environmental prosecutions, separate from its 2024 policy, weigh whether a company adopted its program in good faith and built it to catch problems. EPA’s 1994 criminal case selection guidance says violations found and fixed through a comprehensive self-evaluation program generally won’t be a candidate for “scarce criminal investigative resources.” That memo has guided how EPA’s criminal enforcement program selects cases for decades, including the years I spent there.

4. You answered the request. EPA’s December 2025 “Compliance First” memo lists failure to respond to reasonable information requests as conduct that still warrants formal enforcement. A slow or incomplete answer can help turn an informal matter into a formal one.

5. Your history is clean. EPA’s Audit Policy excludes repeat violations: the same or a closely related violation at the same facility within three years, or a pattern across a company’s facilities within five. OSHA gives a 20 percent reduction to employers with no serious, willful, or failure-to-abate violations (not fixing a previously cited hazard) in the past five years.

Where the Off-Ramps Close

Every one of these factors depends on timing. You can’t disclose what the agency has already found, and EPA’s Audit Policy requires disclosure before an inspection or investigation starts. A correction earns credit only if it comes promptly, not after the agency has to push for it. A compliance program counts only if it was in place before the problem, not built in response to it. And a clean history takes years to build, but a repeat violation at a single facility can take the Audit Policy off the table.

Go back to the facility from last week’s newsletter. Its air compliance status has been classified as being a High-Priority Violator (HPV), EPA’s most serious category of Clean Air Act noncompliance, for seven straight years. The same site exceeded its water discharge limits by more than 700 percent in 2022 and was still above 300 percent in 2024. Most of its off-ramps are now closed. The air violations aren’t new, so there is nothing left to disclose. They haven’t been fixed quickly, since the facility is still on the HPV list seven years later. And its history has become the problem. EPA’s December 2025 memo still calls for formal enforcement for “serious, blatant, or knowing and repetitive noncompliance.” Seven years in HPV status is hard to describe any other way.

To be fair, self-disclosure isn’t risk-free. You are handing an agency a violation it may never have found, and good lawyers disagree about when it makes sense. But that debate assumes you find the problem first. Often, a regulator or an NGO working from the same public data will find that violation before you do.

The Practical Question

Under the 2025 changes at EPA and OSHA, the off-ramps are wider than they have been in years. But they are most available to companies that identify problems before a regulator does. Once a regulator reaches out, many of the off-ramps described here are no longer available.

For that reason, it’s worth asking: if a regulator called tomorrow about one of your facilities, what would they ask about, and could you show that your team had already found those problems and started fixing them?

Until next week,

Doug Parker

CEO, Ecolumix

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Coming in Future Issues:

The On-Ramps: What can turn a civil violation into a criminal case.

Environmental risk in mergers and acquisitions (M&A): When You Buy a Facility, You Buy Its Record.

Questions or topics worth covering? Reach out: doug@ecolumix.com