Management involvement with compliance: when distributive management fails, everyone pays.

In this article I discuss the importance of management retaining and exercising its responsibilities for control over studies, especially studies that have been distributed to contractors and subcontractors, hence the title, "Distributive Management." While the clearest examples for distributive management are found in environmental fate and crop residue studies for EPA, similar examples may be found in contemporary toxicology and carcinogenicity studies. The cost of failure to exercise control over contracted studies has been estimated by the EPA at between $600 M and $1,200 M. These are costs that will be borne by the public through higher prices and higher taxes.