Just because you fail to lock your door does not authorize a burglar to come into your house and help himself to your stuff. You don't get to beg off responsibility by claiming the injured party made it too easy for you to help yourself.

This begs the question of precisely how the glitch was discovered and by whom. Did one of the involved businesses initially and accidentally enter the details from an old manifest and then realize that they still got credits? Or, perhaps one of the businesses submitted something twice and got credit for both.

When this is investigated by the EPA OIG (http://www.epa.gov/oig/), the chronology of the fault/exploit/fraud will be investigated along with the parties involved.

This may have involved bits of inside information such as company X hires former enforcement regulator Y from government agency Z who details the precise nature of how various governmental systems work. The possible permutations of how this situation evolved are many.

From my relatively uninformed perspective, the initial read of the article gives me the impression that this is an intentionally fraudulent scheme and criminal manipulation of the government program by the companies involved. However, I clearly do not have enough information to make such a determination.

You can bet the EPA OIG and their Canadian equivalent are going to try to get to the bottom of this.

That's a good point. If it was merely a mistake, then I'm sure the company would not mind the EPA adjusting the credit balance. After all, they did not intend benefit from the error.. they just wanted to ship their goods back and forth for some other reason.