ILMA Compoundings June 2018 - 36

WASHINGTON LANDSCAPE

EPA ProposesTSCA
User Fees Rule
By Daniel Bryant

T

he June 2016 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA)
amendments authorized the
Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) to promulgate a user fee rule for
payments from chemical manufacturers, importers and processors to defray
the costs to implement and administer
the updated statute.
The EPA has proposed user fees,
particularly for large entities, that are significant. The agency is looking primarily
to chemical manufacturers to cover its
TSCA costs, and it is highly probable
that these chemical manufacturers, in
turn, will try to recover those user fees
from downstream customers, including
ILMA manufacturing members.
Based on the amended statute, the
EPA has proposed that user fees be collected for activities including Section 4
testing, Section 5 new chemical reviews
and Section 6 existing chemical risk
evaluations. The agency has proposed
not to collect user fees associated with
any confidential business information
claims or for any risk management
actions that would be taken following a
risk evaluation, if warranted.
The amended statute authorizes the
EPA to collect, through user fees, 25
percent of the costs associated with
implementing the TSCA amendments,
which the agency estimates to be
$80.2 million. The agency, therefore,
proposes to collect approximately
$20.05 million per year from user fees
for fiscal years 2019, 2020 and 2021.

36

JUNE 2018

| COMPOUNDINGS | ILMA.ORG

Full Fee Schedule for Large Entities
(EPA has proposed the following to become operative on Oct. 1, 2018)
Proposed Fee Category

Proposed Large Business Fee

Test Order

$9,800

Test Rule

$29,500

Enforceable Consent Agreement

$22,800

PMN and Consolidated PMN

$16,000

SNUN

$16,000

MCAN and Consolidated MCAN

$16,000

LoREX

$4,700

LVE

$4,700

TME

$4,700

Tier II Exemption

$4,700

EPA-initiated risk evaluation

$1,350,000

Manufacturer-requested risk evaluation on a chemical
included in the Work Plan

$1,300,000

Manufacturer-requested risk evaluation on a chemical
NOT included in the Work Plan

$2,600,000

The EPA asserts that the user fee
rule is functionally a zero-sum game,
in that any reduction in fees associated
with a risk evaluation, for example,
would necessitate a corresponding
increase to another activity to maintain the 25 percent funding threshold.
Regardless of how the EPA ultimately allocates rates for various
TSCA activities, some of the fee
breakdowns in the proposed rule are
unjustifiably high. For example, as
a component of a risk evaluation,
the agency estimates that a literature
search costs nearly $400,000. In its

comments, ILMA urged the EPA
to revisit its costs in the final rule to
ensure they are reasonable and commensurate with the actual time and
effort needed to complete the task1.
The concern, again, is that if a
chemical manufacturer must pay high
fees associated with a TSCA activity,
those costs will be passed along to
downstream processors, including
ILMA manufacturing members, at
possibly unsustainable levels.
While it does not obviate the
concerns with the large entity fees, the
EPA has proposed both increasing the
http://www.ILMA.ORG
ILMA Compoundings June 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ILMA Compoundings June 2018
