Clearing up the Unclear – Business Rules for Compliance Calendar Tasks in Environmental Digital Solutions

A compliance calendar is a tool that includes tasks to maintain compliance with permits or regulations along with the appropriate due dates and associated people responsible for those tasks. Compliance calendars are usually created by determining requirements from permits or regulations. When documenting environmental compliance requirements in a digital compliance calendar, one of the key tools to ensure consistency and accuracy is business rules. Using business rules can help ensure that ambiguous requirements are treated similarly even if they are not written identically or addressed by the same person.

Business rules are essential decisions that ensure consistency across various operations, particularly when creating compliance task content for multiple permits and regulations. These rules address specific topics and gray areas that often arise during the creation of compliance tasks. In this blog article, I will discuss several situations in which business rules can streamline processes, reduce the burden of maintaining compliance content, and ensure that all regulatory obligations are met efficiently. Below I describe various unclear situations and the recommended business rule approach to address each situation.

Non-Actionable Requirements

All permits and regulations include sections such as definitions or descriptions that do not drive any compliance tasks. A specific example would be a requirement that is only duplicative, such as the Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) ZZZZ’s requirement. This requirement indicates certain engine types comply with MACT ZZZZ by complying with New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) IIII or NSPS JJJJ as applicable.

Recommendation – Do not include non-actionable requirements in the compliance task content. While it might seem attractive to include every piece of a permit or regulation for completeness, in practice this approach creates additional content which needs to be updated and maintained without adding additional compliance value.

Requirements Involving Physical Changes at Site

Certain permit requirements, such as routing sources to control systems, necessitate physical modifications to equipment. These changes should ideally trigger a Management of Change (MOC) review. To ensure compliance and consistency, it is essential to establish a business rule that specifies the frequency of reviews for these requirements.

Recommendation – One approach is to perform infrequent verifications at different intervals such as annually to confirm no changes have occurred since the last check. Another approach is to do a onetime check with the expectation that any changes after the initial check would be captured by the MOC process.

Unpredictable Event Requirements

There are some requirements which outline actions to take in response to unpredictable events, such as spills or unexpected emissions. For instance, many state agencies require notifications when these events occur. However, because they cannot be anticipated, establishing recurring tasks based on their potential frequency is impractical.

Recommendation – Use a task to look back over a previous period and verify that if the event occurred, the associated compliance requirements were met. Train compliance personnel on the emissions release reporting requirements in their area of responsibility.

Very Frequent Requirements

Some compliance requirements, such as operator rounds, observations, and sampling have fixed frequencies and are required to be conducted daily or weekly.

Recommendation – Use a monthly task to confirm that the more frequent tasks occurred correctly. Weekly tasks can seem manageable in theory, but in practice the high volume of tasks per year associated with a weekly task can be overwhelming for users.

Requirements without a Specific Frequency

Many permit requirements do not have a specified frequency. A specific example of this type of requirement in Texas is that opacity be limited without specifying how frequently observations be performed. Other requirements are required by the permit or regulatory language to be done continuously, including the NSPS 60.18 requirement that flare pilot lights operate continuously when gases may be vented to the flare. Compliance tasks cannot be set to recur continuously, so a different approach must be used.

Recommendation -Implement a task to retrospectively verify that compliance requirements were met over a specified period. For example, environmental personnel at a site might conduct monthly checks to verify opacity levels were not exceeded during the previous month and that the flare pilot light was lit any time the flare might be controlling gases.

When the requirement does not have a specific frequency, consider the following questions to establish an appropriate frequency for the verification task.

• Current Frequency: Assess whether existing compliance checks are being conducted at an acceptable frequency. For example, if environmental personnel are checking the flare pilot monthly for permit deviation purposes, maintaining this frequency can streamline efforts and minimize changes. However, multiple environmental personnel may not be performing checks on consistent intervals, so matching current practice may not provide the desired consistency.
• Risk vs. Workload: Another consideration where consistency is valued above matching existing practice is the level of risk associated with a longer interval between execution of a task and overwhelming environmental personnel. For example, it is not generally feasible to set every task as a monthly task as this would result in a significant number of compliance tasks due every month and an overwhelming amount of work. It can also be a problem to set all tasks to annual because if a compliance issue is detected, it may have been out of compliance for up to a year before the issue is realized and corrected.

The ALL4 Digital Solutions team has experience supporting content generation from permits and regulatory requirements as well as loading content into tools. If you want to learn more about any part of this, please contact Julie Taccino at jtaccino@all4inc.com or 281-201-1247.