ISCD Publishes August CFATS Fact Sheet for August 2015

This afternoon the DHS Infrastructure Security Compliance Division (ISCD) published the August 2015 Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) Fact Sheet. There was little change in the number of authorized Site Security Plans (SSPs) and an even smaller change in the number of covered facilities. We do see a significant continued improvement in the number of facilities with approved SSPs.

The table below provides a comparison of the numbers in the July 2015 and August 2015 Fact Sheets.

	August 2015	July 2015
Covered Facilities	3,223	3,229
Authorized SSPs	3,139	3,121
Approved SSPs	2,021	1,935

CFATS Fact Sheet Data

It is too early to see any significant change in the Approved SSP numbers due to the Expedited Approval Program. Facilities were able to start submitting EAP SSPs about half-way through the month, but the folks at ISCD still have to review and approve those submissions. The Department has up to 100 days to complete that review. I suspect that we could start to see some of those approval affecting the September 2015 Fact Sheet numbers.

ISCD is still not reporting the number of compliance inspections conducted or the results of those inspections. According to a recent GAO report (pg 28), as of February of this year there had been 69 compliance inspections completed with only 35 of those facilities having passed the inspection. The GAO reported that ISCD was working with the non-compliant facilities instead of taking any of the authorized enforcement activities available to the Department.

NOTE: There had been a minor coordination issue earlier in the day with the publication of the Fact Sheet. The Critical Infrastructure: Chemical Security web page change which provided the link to the new fact sheet was published before the link became active so the page was for a short time pointing at the July 2015 Fact Sheet.