Hoons and litterbugs have fines refunded after EPA discovers officers lacked powers

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Litterbugs and hoons will have their fines refunded after the Environment Protection Authority realised dozens of its officers did not have the required powers to issue the penalties.

A system error meant the officers did not have proper authority to issue fines or begin court action for some infringements, invalidating 4100 fines with a combined value of $1.4 million and affecting 19 finalised prosecutions.

Dozens of EPA officers did not have proper authority to issue fines in thousands of cases.

The fines, issued since June 2022, include 2000 that will be refunded and about 2100 that remain unpaid and which will be withdrawn.

They related to littering, vehicle infringements and environmental infringements over reporting requirements, permission and waste offences.

The EPA will also have to pay $650,000 refunding fines and legal costs for 19 finalised prosecutions.

EPA chief executive Joss Crawford said those 19 defendants would need to seek legal advice but did not expect many appeals to the prosecutions, which resulted in fines ranging from $1000 to $35,000.

“They may do nothing; they may appeal the matter,” Crawford said.

Six of the prosecutions were for indictable offences, which can be criminal or civil cases, which the EPA could reissue charges for. Just four of the criminal cases resulted in a conviction being recorded, one of which related to noise while three were failure to comply with EPA orders.

Three of the prosecutions related to lower-level summary offences.

“A law was broken, we hope that we’ve got the behaviour change, which was the intent,” Crawford said. “We’re not expecting a lot of appeals. If they do appeal, then we’ll determine whether we want to reissue charges,” she said.

“None of them are our major matters.”

She said the authority reissued charges for six other prosecutions that were yet to be finalised.

The EPA launched an internal investigation in September after discovering that 25 of its 250 officers were working without full authorisation since they were appointed between June 2022 and January 2023.

The system error affects fewer than 10 per cent of the more than 45,000 fines issued since June 2022.

With 80 prosecutions currently before the courts, Crawford stressed the 19 prosecutions affected also related to a small pool of the EPA’s work.

“The scale of this is incredibly small, but obviously the board and myself want to front-foot this. We want to be completely transparent.”

The EPA recorded a $16.1 million deficit in 2024-25, an improvement from $44.3 million the year prior, according to its annual report.

Crawford insisted the error would have no impact on the authority’s frontline services. She said the error was discovered through the EPA’s own checks and had since been rectified.

“So we know we’ve caught this. There’s no further issues, and we’ve fixed that systems error so it can’t happen again.”

The authority is writing to all those affected, and Crawford apologised for the inconvenience of the “regrettable situation”.

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