The General Office of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment ("MEE") has recently issued the Three-Year Action Plan for Supervisory Checks of the Quality of Ecological Environment Monitoring (2018-2020) (the "Plan").
The Plan sets the goals of continually optimizing the responsibility system for guaranteeing the quality of ecological environment monitoring data, severely cracking down on improper intervention in ecological environment monitoring activities, and effectively curbing issues of fabricating or falsifying data by ecological environment monitoring agencies and pollutant discharge entities, by 2020. Further, the Plan states that, supervisory inspections will be launched to look at the quality of existing various ecological environment monitoring activities at the service of the ecological environment administration, including the monitoring performed by ecological environment monitoring agencies, self-monitoring activities of pollutant discharge entities and the automatic monitoring of ambient air and surface water, and particular attention will be given to checking, for the regulatory purpose, whether the quality system of the monitoring agency works in a standard way, whether there are any fabricated or falsified monitoring data, and whether there are any other improper behaviors to intervene in the ecological environment monitoring. Furthermore, the Plan states that monitoring agencies, pollutant discharge entities and the quality of operation and maintenance, will be inspected, and also provides the way to organize these inspections, the time schedule, the application of inspection outcomes and safeguard measures.