The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has significantly missed its publicly stated goal of March for the release of the 2003 Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). The agency made several changes to its data management in an effort to streamline the process, apparently to no avail. In recent years, the agency has been releasing the annual TRI database in May or June. The TRI data remains one of EPA's mostly widely-used databases, however the agency seems incapable of speeding up the process to release the database. Public interest groups have regularly complained that the delay make the data less timely and therefore less useful. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has also chastised EPA for the regular delays with a prompt letter in March 2002 from its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs urging the agency to find ways to speed up the annual release of TRI data. However, the following year EPA had one of the longest delays, releasing the 2001 TRI on June 30, 2003 -- one day before companies were required to submit their TRI forms for 2002. As part of the agency's recent efforts to speed up the process of confirming and finalizing the data, EPA discussed procedural changes and timelines with interested stakeholders months ahead of time. The agency also reduced its analysis report of the data and publicly posted a Nov. 2004 database of the individual TRI forms. Unfortunately, it appears these efforts have resulted in little actual change. Even with minimal analysis done by EPA, this year is no faster and may be among the latest. EPA is also in the process of evaluating several significant changes to TRI reporting, in an attempt to reduce the reporting burden on companies. Given the agency's continued problems managing the current TRI system, it seems that major changes would be inadvisable and likely lead to additional delays.