EPA Suspends Contracts With S.D. Firm : Toxic Waste: The company, which receives money from the $8.5-billion Superfund cleanup program, allegedly falsified test data. The government is also investigating for criminal violations.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has suspended Environmental Chemistry Laboratory of San Diego from all government contracts for up to 18 months for allegedly falsifying test data on substances collected from toxic waste sites.

The EPA is also investigating possible criminal violations by the laboratory, a unit of giant Science Applications International Corp. of La Jolla. The investigation is expected to take as long as 18 months.

Test data from an unspecified number of water and soil samples was falsified, EPA spokesman Terry Wilson said. The samples were collected by the EPA from some of the 111 toxic spill sites in the EPA’s Western region that have qualified for aid from the so-called federal Superfund to help pay for toxic cleanups.

“The public must have full confidence that agency decisions are being made on the basis of reliable information,” Daniel W. McGovern, regional administrator for EPA’s San Francisco office, said in a statement on Friday. “When EPA suspects that the integrity of a company has been compromised, we will aggressively investigate the matter and, when appropriate, propose and implement a suspension.”

Unspecified criminal charges or fines could result from the investigation of the laboratory, which is on Campus Point Drive in San Diego, Wilson said. The EPA could also decide to permanently bar the laboratory from federal contracts.

SAIC Senior Vice President Chuck Nichols said his company prompted the investigation by notifying the EPA of irregularities in test data in 1988. A certain number of employees at the laboratory have since been “replaced,” although Nichols declined to say how many and whether they had been fired.

In a statement issued Friday, SAIC admitted to “not processing certain (Superfund) samples in accordance with its contract,” but said that, after alerting the EPA to the problem, it “brought in a new team of managers . . . and instituted new controls to assure these problems do not reoccur.”

“We disclosed this problem with the EPA in early 1988 and have been cooperating with them continuously since then,” Nichols said in the statement.

SAIC’s Nichols said he is “quite hopeful” that the employees being investigated are no longer working at SAIC. The investigation is being handled by the EPA’s enforcement section, Wilson said.

EPA spokesman Terry Wilson declined to say how many instances of falsification had turned up. The only details he offered on the kinds of toxics in question were that they were “volatile organic substances” that break down rapidly in nature and therefore must be analyzed with all haste.

EPA investigators found that Environmental Chemistry Laboratory “failed to conduct tests on samples within the 10-day time frame as required under its contract. Further investigation also indicated that records and documents were backdated and falsified,” according to the statement released by the government agency.

The SAIC laboratory is one of 50 private laboratories contracted by the EPA to provide analytical services for EPA’s Superfund, the $8.5-billion cleanup program passed by Congress in 1986, Wilson said. The data that the labs generate from analysis and evaluation is reported to EPA and used as a basis for Superfund “remedial and removal actions,” the statement said.

The laboratory employs about 28 people. With about $2 million in revenue, it generates only a fraction of SAIC’s overall business. SAIC, headquartered in La Jolla, is a contract research firm specializing in defense, environmental and energy work, with overall sales of $1 billion and payroll of 12,000 employees, Nichols said.