One of the guiding principles behind the chemical industry’s Responsible Care® program is a commitment to “publicly report our global health, safety and environmental performance.” Launched in 1988 to respond to public concerns about chemicals, the program pledged to “make continuous progress toward the vision of no accidents, injuries or harm to the environment,” and to seek public input on plant operations. For the past decade the industry’s trade association, now called the American Chemistry Council, has touted the industry’s successes under the program. All the while, big chemical manufacturers were quietly working behind the scenes, promoting a new tactic to win unprecedented guarantees that allow them to keep many of their pollution and worker exposure problems secret from the public, the courts and environmental regulators. At least 25 state legislatures have adopted what are called “audit privilege” laws. Essentially, these laws allow companies to keep secret all information about toxic chemical releases, spills, and other environmental problems if the companies discover the problems themselves during “self-audits.” Violations of pollution law that are found must be reported to state authorities, and the polluters must pledge to correct the problems. In exchange, in many states, the companies are exempted from any penalties, except in rare cases when criminal fines are imposed. They are also allowed to keep almost all documentation of the problems secret – even from state regulators. In some states, companies are not even required to prove that they have cleaned up the pollution found during the audit, yet they may stamp “audit privilege” on lab tests, water sample or air monitoring reports, maps, or other documents and keep them forever under seal. In states with such “privilege” laws, the evidence from self-audits cannot be obtained or used in lawsuits by ordinary citizens or in regulatory actions by state agencies. The idea behind these laws was to encourage chemical companies to be good stewards - to find and clean up their own contamination without fear that they would be punished for doing the right thing. In practice, however, the laws appear to have done little to relieve environmental ills, but have gone far in continuing to thwart the public’s right-to-know about contamination and other potential health effects in their communities. A 1998 study by the National Conference of State Legislatures found that privilege and immunity laws made no difference whatsoever in the number of companies that disclosed violations and cleaned them up and, the study noted, companies usually admitted to only minor violations found during self-audits. In a presentation to the EPA, the Attorneys General of six states expressed concern that companies could use the broad secrecy privileges in the laws “to hide information that should be disclosed to enforcement officials,” resulting in limiting access to important evidence. In Texas, one of the most extreme audit privilege laws, signed in 1995 by then-governor George W. Bush, makes it illegal to publicly reveal “privileged” pollution information. The law gives corporations themselves the power to decide which information to claim as privileged. Austin attorney Rick Lowerre says the Texas law leaves too much room for cheating. Lowerre represents citizens groups who have sued companies over contaminated groundwater and other problems. If a company suspects that neighbors plan to sue because their wells are contaminated, he says, all the company has to do is a self-inspection, assert the audit privilege, and internal documents related to the pollution cannot be used in court. Sandy Buchanan, executive director of Ohio Citizen Action, says the law in her state even allows companies to withhold information about pollution problems that began long ago. For instance, Buchanan says, if a company discovered during a self-audit that benzene had been dumped into unlined pits 40 years ago, it could keep all documentation of that problem a secret. “Citizens need to be able to dig for the underlying facts if they are going to find out how serious contamination problems really are,” Buchanan says. “That’s why the privilege law is so insidious. It is designed to prevent citizens from finding the smoking gun.”