numerical integrator dodesol_mk52lfn and tolerance

I am using dodesol_mk52lfn as a replacement for the Gear numerical integrator in the IMSL.  dodesol_mk52lfn has a tolerance input argument, ep, which I do not understand.  dodesol_mk52lfn output matches IMSL quite well with ep on the order of 0.1 to 1.0, whereas it seems that this argument ought to be on the order of 1e-6.  For instance, the example problem in the documentation uses ep=1e-6 and says this produces accuracy of "about 5%".

ep DOUBLE PRECISION

(input) Relative error tolerance, which must be small enough. The code cannot ensure the requested accuracy for ep<1.d-9. This parameter is used to control the step size.

Thanks,

Brian Murphy