Letting corporations clean up after other corporations sometimes leaves a bigger mess. At least, that is what Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) in Massachusetts are saying today.

Massachusetts has outsourced its toxic clean-up responsilibities to private contractors, who have failed spectacularly in repeated state audits. (Most other states assign clean-up to public agencies.) Some of the findings in a review of Massachusetts state records:

• Three out of every four private clean-ups failed to pass state audits

• Nearly one in ten were so deficient that they were completely invalidated and retracted.

• Nearly three-out of four (71%) of private clean-ups will require some sort of follow-up work, such as retesting or additional soil removal

PEER says clean-up failure rates have almost doubled during Governor Mitt Romney's reign.