  We present a simple analysis that allows us to extract the leading mass
dependence of the dipole moment of matter fermions that might be induced by new
physics. We present explicit results for the supersymmetric model with broken
R-parity as an illustration. We show that the extra contributions to the
electric dipole moment (edm) of fermions from R-parity violating interactions
can occur only at two loop level, contrary to claims in the literature. We
further find that unlike the generic lepto-quark models, the extra
contributions to the dipole moments of the leptons can only be enhanced by
m_b/m_l and not by m_t/m_l relative to the expectations in the Standard Model.
An interesting feature about this enhancement of these dipole moments is that
it does not involve unknown mixing angles. We then use experimental constraints
on the electric dipole moments of electron and neutron to obtain bounds on (the
imaginary part of) products of R-parity violating couplings, and show that
bounds claimed in the literature are too stringent by many orders of magnitude.
