ISCD Publishes CFATS Update – May 2016

Today the DHS Infrastructure Security Compliance Division (ISCD) published their May 2016 CFATS Fact Sheet. This document provides a monthly update of the implementation of the site security plan (SSP) program in the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS). ISCD continues to increase the number of authorized and approved SSPs as well as a significant increase in the number of compliance inspections.

	March 2016	April 2016	May 2016
Covered Facilities	3,074	3,029	3,018
Authorized SSPs	3,324	3,336	3,356
Approved SSPs	2,449	2,462	2,525
Compliance Inspections	624	726	854

We continue to see the same problems with these numbers that we have seen every month for quite some time now. We continue to see a decline in the number of covered facilities without any explanation of why the facilities are leaving the program. The number of authorized SSPs continues to increase well beyond the number of facilities that remain in the program. Finally, we continue to see a report of the number of compliance inspections conducted without any indication of the rate at which those facilities are found within compliance with their negotiated SSP requirements.

The number of approved SSPs has now reached 75% of the number of covered facilities, if there is not the same counting problem that affects the number of authorized SSPs. It would be nice, however, if additional details were included, additional numbers that could have been provided would have been the number of facilities that were approved based upon their submission of an Expedited Approval Program SSP. With the recent implementation of the Terrorist Screening Database screening portion of the Personnel Surety Program a report on the number of approved SSPs that include the TSDB vetting.

While I am glad to see that ISCD is continuing to voluntarily report these CFATS Updates, it looks like it is really just a PR ploy since there are so many problems with the data being provided. If ISCD really wants this to mean anything, they need to consider updating what they are reporting.