The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized 91 enforcement settlement agreements in the first quarter of 2026, generating $3.37 million in penalties. The largest action, $781,175, involved a Class I Operating Permit breach and failure to meet Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) standards under the Clean Air Act (CAA). Read the enforcement summary and a theme runs through it: most of the violations were not discovered because something broke. They were discovered because someone showed up with a clipboard and the records did not hold up.
That is the enforcement environment EHS teams are walking into this summer. And for a lot of those teams, the most honest question to ask right now is not whether the facility is in compliance. It is whether the facility can show it.
Permit Drift Is the Enforcement Exposure Nobody Scheduled Time to Find
Operating permits get issued at a point in time. Then operations change. Equipment gets added. Production volumes shift. Processes get modified. And somewhere in there, the permit stops matching what the facility is actually doing. Nobody made a decision to let that happen. It just accumulated.
That is permit drift, and it produced the largest Clean Air Act fine in Q1 2026. For EHS teams that have not compared current operations against permit conditions in the past 18 months, that review is overdue. It is not a quick document check. It requires going through actual emissions, discharge volumes, waste generation rates, and process configurations and comparing them against what the permit says. It is the kind of task that gets bumped when the calendar fills up, which is exactly why it becomes an enforcement problem.
Facilities that treat permit renewal as a compliance milestone rather than an ongoing obligation are carrying risk they have not formally assessed. An inspector will assess it for them.
RCRA Enforcement in Q1 Shows What Happens When Administrative Work Slips
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) enforcement in the first quarter of 2026 had a consistent profile across the cases. A Hawai'i-based environmental services company paid $165,000 for hazardous secondary materials notification failures. An Illinois safety equipment company was fined $100,675 for operating without required permits and failing to meet hazardous waste generator standards. A Nebraska facility collected citations totaling $58,900 after inspectors found unlabeled open containers of hazardous waste and a contingency plan that had not been updated.
None of those are operational disasters. They are maintenance failures. Labels not updated. Plans not reviewed after staff turnover. Permits not renewed when they should have been. The kind of work that keeps slipping to next week, then next month, then into the calendar year that ends with an enforcement action.
The RCRA pattern matters to note because it does not come with internal warning signals. The operation can look fine while the administrative record is quietly building exposure.
OSHA Changed How It Weighs Inspections and Most EHS Programs Have Not Caught Up
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) conducted 34,625 inspections in fiscal year 2024. In fiscal year 2025, the agency replaced its previous inspection weighting mechanism, the OSHA Weighting System (OWS), with a new framework called the Enforcement Impact Index (EII). It is not a minor adjustment. The EII weights inspections based on emphasis program targeting and progress toward agency priority goals, which means OSHA's programmed inspection capacity is now being directed more deliberately toward specific hazard categories.
The current emphasis list: falls in construction and general industry, machine guarding, confined space entry, respirable silica, combustible dust, heat illness prevention. If your internal audit protocol was built before the EII replaced the OWS, it is not measuring against the same benchmark an inspector is using when they walk through the door. That creates a gap between what your program is designed to demonstrate and what you are actually being evaluated against.
Heat illness enforcement is worth specific attention. OSHA does not have a finalized federal heat illness standard yet, but that has not slowed enforcement. The agency is citing through the General Duty Clause, and inspectors are looking closely at acclimatization documentation, environmental monitoring records, and whether supervisor training logs reflect recent seasons, not a binder from four years ago.
What a Pre-Inspection Documentation Review Should Actually Cover
The three areas that consistently separate facilities that pass from facilities that collect citations are not complicated, but they do require deliberate time. First, permit alignment: are current operations still within the conditions of the operating permit? If processes have changed since the last formal review, that question needs an answer before an inspector provides one. Second, training records: do they show current program versions, current standards, and current personnel? A training log that references a 2021 program version when OSHA has issued interpretation letters updating guidance since then is a visible gap. Third, corrective action logs: does the record show a functioning compliance program, meaning identified issues, assigned corrective actions, and documented follow-through? An inspector reading a corrective action log can tell in about four minutes whether the program is active or ceremonial.
Summer inspection windows are predictable. Facilities in high-hazard sectors know they are coming. The ones that use the weeks before them to run honest internal reviews consistently come out of inspections in better shape than those that do not. The enforcement data from Q1 2026 is not complicated to read. Citations are going to facilities whose programs work but whose records cannot prove it.
