MILWAUKEE, Wis. ­­- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency routinely allows companies to keep new information about their chemicals secret, including compounds that have been shown to cause cancer and respiratory problems, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has found.

The newspaper examined more than 2,000 filings in the EPA’s registry of dangerous chemicals for the past three years. In more than half the cases, the EPA agreed to keep the chemical name a secret. In hundreds of other cases, it allowed the company filing the report to keep its name and address confidential.

This is despite a federal law calling for public notice of any new information through the EPA’s program monitoring chemicals that pose substantial risk. The whole idea of the program is to warn the public of newfound dangers.

The EPA’s rules are supposed to allow confidentiality only “under very limited circumstances.”

Legal experts and environmental advocates say the practice of “sanitizing,” or blacking out, this information not only strips vital information from the public, it violates the agency’s own law.

Section 14 of the Toxic Substances Control Act, the foundation for all the EPA’s toxic and chemical regulations, stipulates that chemical producers may not be granted confidentiality when it comes to health and safety data.

“The EPA has chosen to ignore that,” said Wendy Wagner, a law professor at the University of Texas-Austin.

The newspaper’s findings are the latest example of how EPA administrators more often than not put company interests above the needs of consumers.

It’s been frustrating to see the program “starved of resources and generally abandoned,” said Myra Karstadt, a toxicologist who worked on the EPA’s program from 1998 to 2005. “It’s a very worthwhile program but only if it’s given a chance to work.”

The program began 30 years ago as a way to help the public avoid contact with dangerous chemicals. The law requires companies that make chemicals to submit any information of potential hazards about their products to the EPA. The EPA, in turn, is supposed to make that information available to communities and consumers.

Companies can claim confidentiality if they are worried that their disclosures will reveal trade secrets.

They have to answer 14 questions, including specifics on why disclosing the information would harm the company.

EPA administrators then decide which ones are granted confidentiality.

EPA spokesman Dale Kemery said the agency realizes the claims of confidentiality “do in some instances limit the public’s ability to understand the specifics of a particular filing.” In those cases, the agency works with the companies to get them to provide more information, which many do, he said.

But the Journal Sentinel examination of the agency’s substantial risk program found that large information gaps remain. More than half of the 32 submissions for March 2004, for example, are still missing information necessary for the public to connect the name of the chemical with the information submitted.

Some have no information at all.

Consider File No. 8EHQ-0308-17103A.

The EPA document, filed in March, marks as confidential the names of the chemical and the company that makes it. Even the generic class of chemical has been removed.

What is the information that this unnamed company is submitting about this unnamed chemical so the public can see if it poses a substantial risk? Anxious consumers have no way of knowing.

“No information is provided in the sanitized copy of the submission,” the EPA Web site entry reads.

Another filing in May refers to a study that shows a chemical had caused liver abnormalities consistent with cancer. Again, the chemical name and any identifying information are blacked out.

“The public is being denied useful and sometimes critical information on chemical-related health and environmental hazards,” said Karstadt, the former EPA toxicologist.

Karstadt said the whole point of the program was to provide the public with information about dangerous chemicals.

“By law, health and safety data is supposed to be kept open,” she said.

The EPA’s own Web site indicates that studies, letters and accident reports are intended to be viewed by the public so citizens can “understand potential human health and environmental risks associated with exposure to chemical substances.”

The EPA posts all reports, redacted or not, on its Web site.