I'm waiting for this one to show up in an episode of Law & Order: GAO Unit.
The Government Accountability Office's Forensic Audits and Special Investigations team conducted a covert test of the federal Energy Star certification program and found it didn't guard against fraud or abuse, the Associated Press reported.
The investigators managed to get the Energy Star label approved for 15 fake products out of the 20 presented. These included a gas-powered alarm clock and a geothermal heat pump that should have raised flags because it was waaaay more efficient than any Energy Star heat pumps now available.
According to a transcript of an interview with the investigators ...
... they found that the approvals happened in hours, sometimes even minutes, calling into question whether the certification was anything more of a rubber stamp progress.
This isn't the first time that the Energy Star program has been criticized. In 2008, Consumer Reports said Energy Star had lax, out-of-date standards for many products. In 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy's Inspector General found that 90 percent of the CFLs on the market met Energy Star criteria, even though guidelines that only the top 25 percent of the most efficient products should qualify for the labeling. (But by all means, Energy Star-rated CFLs are still the best choice, CR notes.)