Starting yesterday, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) began disclosing information online about those violating environmental regulations, making it the first government organization to open such records to the public.
In addition to disclosing violations from last year, the EPA announced 16 violations reported between Jan. 1 and June 30 of this year. Violators included CPC, Corp, Taiwan, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications Railway Reconstruction Bureau, Standard Chartered Bank, Chang Gung Hospital, the Industrial Development Bureau of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and 11 others.
The penalties for the organizations ranged from NT$300,000 to NT$500,000. The cases are now all posted on the EPA’s Web site at www.epa.gov.tw/penalty. The information posted in this section will be updated every four months.
The EPA said in a statement that the new regulation on open public records promulgated on June 1 categorized “violations” as non-restricted public information.
The EPA will disclose the names of violators, the time and locations of the violations, the names of the cases, as well as the laws that were allegedly broken. It will disclose the status of the cases, including whether or not the violators have filed appeals as well as the results of the appeals.
The EPA, however, will not disclose confidential information related to the operations of these organizations.
The EPA said that local environmental protection bureaus are not obligated to take the same initiative.
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