Chemical board still not cooperating, investigator says

The Chemical Safety Board (CSB) has still refused to provide the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) with documents it requested more than a year ago for an investigation, the OIG said Wednesday.

Inspector General Arthur Elkins sent a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, telling him that CSB Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso sent only a subset of the requested documents in late June.

For example, Moure-Eraso has not disclosed any of the emails the OIG requested from his private account.

“There is not one document in the production to the OIG dated June 26, 2014, by the CSB that fits the description of an email generated by the CSB Chairman on a non-governmental email account,” OIG said in a statement.

The Oversight Committee held a hearing in June at which members from both parties hammered Moure-Eraso for his management of the agency and called for him to resign. The hearing focused in part on allegations that CSB had retaliated against whistleblowers.

At the hearing, Elkins, whose office has authority over CSB, told lawmakers that the OIG had requested documents from Moure-Eraso since early 2013, including official emails he sent on a private Gmail account. Moure-Eraso’s attorney some highly redacted documents in 2013, but refused to send others.

That prompted the OIG to send a letter to Congress in September saying it had exhausted all means to obtain the documents from CSB.

Issa told Moure-Eraso to comply with OIG’s requests at the June hearing, and he promised to be more cooperative. But in a letter Tuesday, OIG said little had changed.

OIG demanded in its letter that Moure-Eraso comply with the request within five days and sign a certification that he had done so.