Elimination of Special Treatment for Category of Confidential Business Information

Résumé

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposes to amend its regulations to eliminate the special treatment given to a category of confidential business information (CBI) received by EPA. This category of information includes comments received from businesses to substantiate their claims of confidentiality for previously submitted information (``a substantiation''). Under EPA's existing regulations, EPA automatically regards a substantiation as entitled to confidential treatment if it is not otherwise possessed by EPA and is properly marked as confidential when received by EPA. EPA proposes to eliminate this provision because special treatment of substantiations is no longer necessary to support the original purpose of the regulation, and elimination of this provision will bring EPA into conformity with how substantiations are treated by other federal agencies.