A third party that threatens the environment

A reporter who went undercover and infiltrated two third-party environmental monitoring agencies in Xi'an and Taiyuan found they were frequently fabricating data, altering monitoring data and producing false monitoring reports to assist polluting enterprises to go undetected.

Third-party environmental monitoring agencies that specialize in environmental monitoring, assessment, and other services are independent of both the government and private enterprises. However, as reported, the daily work of sampling personnel attached to such agencies involves sampling fraud, modifying data, making things up, and becoming the "pollution guards" of the polluting clients, further emboldening them to violate rules.

In this way, the polluting enterprises, third-party environmental monitoring agencies and even equipment manufacturers who intentionally leave loopholes have all crossed the line, and are inviting legal punishment.

The third parties who unremittingly help enterprises "meet standards" ignore public interests and create obstacles for environmental law enforcement. Effective from March 1, 2021, the 11th Amendment to the Criminal Law has included "falsification" by intermediary organizations who undertake environmental impact assessment and environmental monitoring responsibilities into the realm of crime. Those falsifying data might face the risk of imprisonment if the judiciary feels they had committed crimes.

In February 2023, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment released the 13th batch of typical cases of ecological environment law enforcement, targeting for the first time the falsification of a few third-party environmental monitoring agencies. The aforementioned falsification cases serve as a warning to third-party environmental monitoring agencies that illegal acts will not be tolerated.

Apart from cracking down on environmental monitoring data fraud, it is also necessary to reflect on why third-party environmental monitoring agencies are willing to use their professional expertise to help entities falsify data and evade supervision.

The third-party monitoring agencies must realize that by doing so they are destroying the ecological environment, which will also affect the healthy development of the entire industry.