ASEA Presents New System For Incident Reports

ASEA revealed its new “Popular Denunciation System”, a new way for citizens to file complaints as well as safety and environmental issues.

The system will use an online platform to log complaints from individuals, organizations and companies. The complaints will have to fulfill minimum criteria outlined by Mexico’s environmental laws, but the process will be greatly simplified when compared to the traditional route considered the only one available. 

When presenting this new system, ASEA Executive Director Angel Carrizales López revealed that from Sep 1 2020 to Aug. 31 2021, ASEA received 108 complaints. 42 percent were directed towards gas companies, 28 percent were directed at fuel service stations, nine percent concerned ducts and pipelines, seven percent concerned hydrocarbon spills and four percent concerned general environmental damage and pollution, while the remaining 10 percent were caused by other events. SEMARNAT leader María Luisa Albores González praised ASEA’s success in addressing these complaints and also presenting a new system. She also noted that the new denunciation system “represents a fundamental tool to bring the government closer to the people, which is an objective mandated by the National Development Plan,” according to a press release from ASEA.

The system will be accessible through https://denunciaspopulares.asea.gob.mx/ , and was developed by an in-house team in ASEA using open-source software and coding. The system also allows anonymity for the identity of the person or organization making the complaint for security reasons. ASEA officials are expecting 2022 to be a very busy year in terms of inspections of entities and companies. According to the agency, this new system is ultimately meant to reinforce these efforts.

In an interview with MBN, ASEA Head of the Supervision, Inspection and Industrial Surveillance Unit Ing. José Luis González González specified that these kinds of online tools were to become the norm at the agency following the events of the pandemic: “We began adopting online modalities and receiving all the training necessary to manage them. These efforts allowed us to continue operating, executing evaluations and issuing authorizations. Now, these online modalities are quotidian and, for the most part, we have been able to maintain a reasonable continuity in our operations.”