Each time the loaded train crossed the border the cargo earned its owner a certain amount of Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs), which were awarded by the US EPA to “promote and track production and importation of renewable fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel.” The RINs were supposed to be retired each time the shipment passed the border, but due to a glitch not all of them were. This enabled Bioversal to accumulate over 12 million RINs
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The "glich" sounds to be with the EPA system. Its not clear if the problem is technical (like an ATM giving 40 for 20 requested withdrawl) or if the system did not differentiate between "crossing" and "production and importation", by design or specification. In any event, there's not much in the article that supports any forgery or false claim about the shipment's paperwork, etc. It was more that the EPA had no or poor controls. This latter case is a grey area between willful negligence (poor design of credit-issuance-proceedures) and potential fraud (unethical re-submission).
Just because you fail to lock your door does not authorize a burglar to come into your house and help himself to your stuff. You don't get to beg off responsibility by claiming the injured party made it too easy for you to help yourself.
Maybe a better example: Imagine your eazy-pass was mis-programmed. Going over the GG bridge, you get $$ credited to your account each trip rather than -$$ subtracted. So, depends on if the ez-pass was hacked by the user or just broken/mis-programmed by the EPA.
There's a graduated response to discovering that though, you could:
1) call up ez-pass and let them know
2) think "it's not my problem" and not let them know
3) decide to drive over the bridge more often
4) mention it to all your friends and suggest they drive over the bridge more often
5) strap your ez-pass transponder to a quadcopter and fly it in continual circles past the transponder reader.
I'm not sure where the line is, but somewhere between 3 and 5 is probably "fraudulent" behavior - at least according to my personal ethical standards (even #2 is clearly "wrong"), there's almost certainly a technical legal definition of "fraud" that applies somewhere along that line too.
This begs the question of precisely how the glitch was discovered and by whom. Did one of the involved businesses initially and accidentally enter the details from an old manifest and then realize that they still got credits? Or, perhaps one of the businesses submitted something twice and got credit for both.
When this is investigated by the EPA OIG (http://www.epa.gov/oig/), the chronology of the fault/exploit/fraud will be investigated along with the parties involved.
This may have involved bits of inside information such as company X hires former enforcement regulator Y from government agency Z who details the precise nature of how various governmental systems work. The possible permutations of how this situation evolved are many.
From my relatively uninformed perspective, the initial read of the article gives me the impression that this is an intentionally fraudulent scheme and criminal manipulation of the government program by the companies involved. However, I clearly do not have enough information to make such a determination.
You can bet the EPA OIG and their Canadian equivalent are going to try to get to the bottom of this.
That's a good point. If it was merely a mistake, then I'm sure the company would not mind the EPA adjusting the credit balance. After all, they did not intend benefit from the error.. they just wanted to ship their goods back and forth for some other reason.
edit:
The "glich" sounds to be with the EPA system. Its not clear if the problem is technical (like an ATM giving 40 for 20 requested withdrawl) or if the system did not differentiate between "crossing" and "production and importation", by design or specification. In any event, there's not much in the article that supports any forgery or false claim about the shipment's paperwork, etc. It was more that the EPA had no or poor controls. This latter case is a grey area between willful negligence (poor design of credit-issuance-proceedures) and potential fraud (unethical re-submission).