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Reinvigorating enforcement activity
Q: What steps did you take to try to reach that enforcement threshold?
MR. ALM: I set up a management system to track the activities and outputs of the agency. One of the things that I tracked was compliance with the laws. It worked like this: we identified all the noncompliers, at the beginning of any year, and then set goals for what we expected to get the noncompliance rate down to by the end of the period. I would go around to all the regions quarterly and we would go over this measure, and others, in order to get a sense of how well we were doing in our effort to bring people into compliance.
Q: So the people in the field were doing a good job monitoring noncompliance even though the agency had gotten lax in its enforcement effort? You knew who was in compliance and who was not?
MR. ALM: Yes, we either knew or were able to find out. Once we set clear goals, the enforcement rate did pick up. Ultimately, we reached levels as high as any time in the history of the agency.