The environmental auditing movement gained momentum in the early 1980s as companies beset by new liabilities associated with Superfund and old hazardous waste sites wanted to insure that their operations were adhering to federal and local policies and company procedures. Most audits were initiated to avoid legal conflicts, and many companies brought in outside consultants to do the audits. The audits served many useful functions, including increasing management and employee awareness of environmental issues and initiating data collection and central monitoring of matters previously not watched as carefully. In many companies environmental auditing played a useful role in organizing information about the environment. It paved the way for the pollution prevention movement which had a great impact on company environmental management in the late 1980s when some companies started to view all of their pollution problems comprehensively and not in isolation from one another.