MILWAUKEE – The Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to assess toxic chemicals is as broken as the nation’s financial markets and needs a total overhaul, a congressional audit has found.

The Government Accountability Office has released a report saying the EPA lacks even basic information to say whether chemicals pose substantial health risks to the public. It says actions are needed to streamline and increase the transparency of the EPA’s registry of chemicals. And it calls for measures to enhance the agency’s ability to obtain health and safety information from the chemical industry.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has chronicled the failure of the EPA to disclose information about toxic chemicals in its series, “Chemical Fallout,” which began in 2007 and continues. The newspaper reported that the agency routinely allows companies to keep new information about their chemicals secret, including compounds that have been shown to cause cancer and respiratory problems.

Earlier this year, the Journal Sentinel revealed that the EPA’s Voluntary Children’s Chemical Evaluation Program, which relies on companies to provide information about the dangers of the chemicals they produce, is all but dead. And it disclosed that the agency’s program to screen chemicals that damage the endocrine system had failed to screen a single chemical more than 10 years after the program was launched.

Health and environmental advocates pounced on the GAO’s findings as proof that the EPA has been shirking its responsibilities for years.

“This just shows that the EPA is not any better able to protect Americans from risky chemicals than FEMA was to save New Orleans or the SEC was to cope with the financial collapse,” said John Peterson Myers, a scientist and author who has been writing about chemical risks to human health for more than three decades.

For the EPA to be compared to the collapsed financial markets dramatically underscores the need for a complete overhaul of the regulation of toxic chemicals, said Richard Wiles, executive director of Environmental Working Group, a health watchdog organization based in Washington, D.C.

“The EPA joins the hall of shame of failed government programs,” Wiles said.

The EPA is at high risk for waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement, and needs a broad-based transformation, the auditors found.

Strengthening the EPA is one of the GAO’s three most urgent priorities for the Obama administration. The GAO also called for overhauling the nation’s financial regulatory system, whose inattention helped trigger the global financial crisis, and improving the Food and Drug Administration’s ability to protect the public from unsafe or ineffective drugs and other medical products.