CDR Data Quality Assurance

EPA conducts may activities to ensure the quality of Chemical Data Reporting (CDR) data, including:

• Providing reporting guidance and technical assistance to submitters
• Verifying the validity of CDR submissions
• Incorporating late submissions
• Validating historical data

Providing reporting guidance and technical assistance to submitters

• EPA publishes detailed guidance documents to help submitters determine and complete their reporting obligations under CDR. Guidance is available in CDR GuideME, which also includes archives of documents from past submission periods.
• For companies needing more specific assistance, EPA provides assistance through the TSCA Hotline, the CDX Help Desk, and the eCDRweb mailbox. 
• EPA provides E-CDRweb, which guides users through the process to complete and submit the CDR Form U. This tool helps users avoid common errors.

Verifying the Validity of CDR Submissions

• The CDR rule requires each reporting site’s authorized official (e.g., senior manager/owner/operator) to sign each Form U before submitting it to EPA.
• EPA examines submitted information to identify outliers or non-compliance with CDR reporting requirements. EPA performs a technical audit and data quality checks of selected submissions and notifies submitters of potential errors. EPA notifies submitters asking them to make corrections
• EPA performs additional data quality checks as it prepares the data for public release.
• EPA conducts further analyses when inconsistencies in the CDR data are identified.

Incorporating Late Submissions

At times, EPA receives late submissions or companies correct their submission. As with other submissions (e.g., amendments to the original submission), EPA examines such data for outliers and checked for accuracy before combining them with or replacing data from previous submissions.

Depending on the timing of late and corrected submissions, such information may not become part of the public version of the database.

Validating Historical Data​​​​​​

Prior to electronic reporting, CDR data were submitted on paper and sometimes handwritten. Such reports were submitted without many of the precautions now built into the eCDRweb reporting tool. Initially, EPA manually entered the data then later scanned most submissions, carefully comparing the entered data against the original submission. EPA then reviewed each chemical submitted, sometimes reaching out to the submitters, to ensure the chemical identity was correct. 

Today, submitters chose from a picklist, reporting the identity as it appears on the TSCA Inventory. This change alone provides a much-improved consistency in the reporting and resulting database.