For some industries, it's not just correct, but very correct :-).
I have a bit of experience in working with a financial industry group that coordinated with regulators in different nations (US, EU, UK, Japan, Brazil, Singapore, etc.) in finalizing the details of rules for a fairly esoteric area of finance. None of this stuff is taught in schools except in the most general/theoretical terms. It's very complex and tough to understand without being well versed in: financial markets, stochastic calculus, derivatives, risk models, monte-carlo simulations, trade execution, inter-institution asset liabilities, etc, etc, etc. It's literally impossible to even know half this stuff the regulations covered exists without having worked in the industry for an extended period of time. Much less understand the implications of rules changes.
From the various calls I sat in on, a few things that became clear to me was that:
1) while industry did have a significant say in how the rules were eventually setup, the overriding goal was a) clarity and b) uniformity across jurisdictions. the exact details were (usually) not quite as important.
2) while regulators (i.e. government) left much of the details to the industry group, they a) set the broad goals and guidelines and b) did sometimes make decisions that nearly everyone on the industry side did not like. But those decisions were always accepted in the end (often with lots of offline complaining) -- industry didn't really have a choice.
3) regulators clearly had authority over industry even though the people there were ex-industry. They knew it and everyone in industry clearly knew it.
Essentially, it was regulators off-loading a bunch of work on industry. If they had to pay for it themselves, it would have cost a silly amount of money to set the rules for an sub-industry 99% of people have never even heard of.
Where corruption comes into play is what those "broad goals and guidelines" are. And that's decided at the legislative level, not at the bureaucratic level. Perhaps things are different for the EPA and manufacturing. I can't say as I don't have any experience interacting with the EPA.