Marcy Wheeler: Is Dick Stealing From The U.S. And Giving To His Friends, Again?

[Hissyspit]

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2008/01/10/is-dick-stealing-from-the-us-and-giving-to-his-friends-again

Is Dick Stealing from the US and Giving to His Friends, Again?
By: emptywheel Thursday January 10, 2008 2:12 pm

Remember the Minerals Management Service? That's the Department of Interior agency that is supposed to make sure that when oil companies drill on US or Native American lands, the landowner gets a sufficient return for the oil or gas they take out of the land, or, alternately, that a sufficient amount of oil to account for the royalty on the drilling rights is given back to the US. It's been at the center of scandal before:

For a while, when oil companies drilled oil on federal land, one of three things would happen:

- The oil companies would cheat and tell the government they drilled less oil than they had
- When such fraud was identified, DOI would order its auditors to overlook the cheating
- The byzantine rules governing royalties would make it hard to collect the money you and I are owed
So DOI started a new program. We'd let someone drill oil, and in exchange, the oil company would put a similar amount of oil into the strategic reserve. But when the strategic reserve filled up, the government started using brokers to sell our oil.

It turns out that Susan Wooldridge and Steven Griles had some close ties (as in, sharing a house) to one of the companies bidding to be that broker company, and that that company got to sell our oil even though another broker was willing to charge a higher rate (and therefore pay taxpayers more money). So basically, these two lovebirds accepted a bribe and sold our oil to the lowest bidder.

To fix that problem, they established a Royalty Management Subcommittee, which was supposed to watch out for our interests:

it's supposed to study:

- The extent to which existing procedures and processes for reporting and accounting for federal and Indian mineral revenues are sufficient to ensure that the Minerals Management Service receives the correct amount.

- The audit, compliance and enforcement procedures and processes of the Minerals Management Service to determine if they are adequate to ensure that mineral companies are complying with existing statutes, lease terms, and regulations as they pertain to payment of royalties.

- The operations of the Royalty in Kind program to ensure that adequate policies, procedures and controls are in place to ensure that decisions to take federal oil and gas royalties in kind result in net benefits to the American people.

Though the Royalty Management Subcommittee proved it wasn't really interested in transparency and oversight, seeing as how it had a penchant for meeting in secret.

Now, to be fair, the Royalty Management Subcommittee just got started last year, and it takes a long time to reverse Dick Cheney's corrupt ways. But an IG audit by the Department of Energy has discovered that there are completely inadequate controls on the oil that's supposed to go into our Strategic Public Reserve, and over a quarter of the oil is disappearing.

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[AZBlue]

1. Again?

Unfortunately, I'm sure it's never stopped.

Isn't the Minerals Management Service the agency that just approved oil drilling in an area that will further endanger the polar bear population? Yeah, they're just peachy.