This week the Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general issued a report that should have surprised no one familiar with the state of the nation's wetlands.

Although there have been a few big enforcement actions, generally speaking the report found that the EPA does a poor job of enforcing the Clean Water Act's Section 404, which governs filling in swamps, marshes and bogs.

"EPA identifies violations through a passive, reactive method of relying on complaints and referrals from external sources," the report says. "An incomplete national data system and sporadic coordination with federal and state partners further impair EPA’s ability to maintain an effective 404 enforcement program."

For instance, the report notes, 86 percent of the violations pursued by the Atlanta regional office were referrals from the Corps of Engineers -- which, as we noted in "Paving Paradise", faces its own major challenges in trying to enforce Section 404. Mostly they, like the EPA, depend on someone else to report a problem. As the IG report says, "If the Corps identifies a violation itself, it tends to occur randomly..."

Even when the Corps does find a violation, "three of the interviewed districts determine whether to refer the violation to EPA based on the impact compared with the project’s original scope, while two other districts regard these activities strictly as violations of the §404 permit and resolve them in-house." Some Corps district offices "have essentially stopped sending referrals" to the EPA at all, the EPA's IG found.

Worse, because of data collection limitations, the EPA can't identify repeat violators, and can't access the Corps' records to check them either, Inspector General Wade Najjum reported.

Najjum recommended creating a national tracking system, improving coordination not only with the Corps but with other federal and state agencies involved in wetlands permitting and even revising the 1989 agreement that guides the EPA's work with the Corps, Such a revision is necessary in order to explicitly outline how to handle wetland violations, Najjum said.

EPA's problems with Section 404 are only part of a larger agency failure in enforcing the Clean Water Act's other provisions, Najjum told a congressional hearing earlier this month. At that hearing EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson indicated she is well aware of her agency's shortcomings when it comes to the Clean Water Act. She announced the creation of a Clean Water Action Enforcement Program, the "first step in revamping the compliance and enforcement program."

However, Najjum noted in his report that, while Jackson's staff agreed there's a need to adopt a new strategy for enforcing the law, "the agency's response does not address implementation issues." Will the EPA create a study that sits on a shelf and gets dusty? Or will it finally get around to enforcing a law that's been on the books since 1972? Stay tuned.