Bush and Big Oil
I think the Dems have their work cut out for them, fixing the incredible damage that the Bush Administration and the soon to be former Republican Congress have done.
Unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be stopping yet. There are two recent articles in the New York Times that make that clear, and both pertain to Bush’s asshole buddies in Big Oil.
When Bobby Maxwell, former auditor for the Department of the Interior, blew the whistle on Oil Companies who were cheating on Royalty Payments for gas and oil pumped out of federally owned lands to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, his reward was a pink slip. Luckily for us taxpayers, Bobby Maxwell is not a quitter, and has turned around and sued to expose the fraud. The Times article states:
“When I got this citation, they told me this would be very good for my career,� said Mr. Maxwell, smiling during an interview here. “Next thing I knew, they fired me.� Today, at 53, Mr. Maxwell lives on a $44,000 annual pension in a two-bedroom bungalow in the hills outside the Hawaiian capital.But Mr. Maxwell has hardly disappeared. Instead, he is at the center of an escalating battle with both the oil industry and the Bush administration over how the federal government oversees about $60 billion worth of oil and gas produced every year on federal property. In the process, he has become one of the most nettlesome whistle-blowers Big Oil has ever encountered, a face-off that offers an inside look at how the industry and the government do business together.
Invoking a law that rewards private citizens who expose fraud against the government, Mr. Maxwell has filed a suit in federal court in Denver against the Kerr-McGee Corporation. The suit accuses the company, which was recently acquired by Anadarko Petroleum, of bilking the government out of royalty payments. It also contends that the Interior Department ignored audits indicating that Kerr-McGee was cheating. Three other federal auditors, who once worked for Mr. Maxwell and still work at the Interior Department, have since filed similar suits of their own against other energy companies.
Several of the nation’s biggest oil producers, including Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell and ConocoPhillips, failed in an effort to block Mr. Maxwell’s suit, arguing before an appellate judge that his case would “open the floodgates� to suits by other federal auditors. But the court rejected their pleas, and a trial is set to start on Jan. 16.
Mr. Maxwell’s self-interest is as much in play in the suit as is the public interest. If he wins, Kerr-McGee could be forced to pay more than $50 million in unpaid royalties and penalties, Mr. Maxwell said. Mr. Maxwell and his lawyers could be entitled to keep as much as 30 percent of any funds the government recovers — enough to make him a wealthy man.
All I can say is I hope he wins. The fact that he presented evidence of this fraud to DOI while he was still an employee, and then was not just ignored but told to back off says volumes about how corrupt the DOI has gotten under the Bush administration. The DOI describes Maxwell as a disgruntled employee who is motivated by riches and revenge. That description does not, however, stand up to scrutiny, since this is the same man they awarded in 2002 a citation for his exceptional leadership and achievements, and in light of his attempts, while still an employee, to make the Oil Companies in question accountable for their fraud. The Project on Government Oversight is presenting evidence to aid Bobby Maxwell’s case against the Department of the Interior.
While Maxwell was still employed by the DOI his record of recovering unpaid royalties hidden by accounting tricks, and getting the Oil Companies to fork them over, was time and again nothing short of unbelievable– $20 million from Arco in 1993, Mobil paid more than $40 million in 1998, Chevron paid $95 million, Shell paid $110 million. In his championship of one whistleblower’s lawsuit, he got a total of 15 oil companies to fork over a total of over $440 million. And what he learned championing that lawsuit has brought him to the current state of affairs.
An article at MSNBC states: “In the last few years, royalty money collected from oil companies through enforcement actions has plummeted. For a decade, these collections averaged $193 million a year. But since 2002, that’s dropped to $48 million.” This lack of oversight at the highest levels of government has raped the US taxpayer of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Meanwhile Bush and the DOI are pushing to resume drilling off the coast of Alaska, giving those same Oil and Gas companies the ability to cheat the US taxpayer out of more dough. And this at a time when the Bush Administration has gutted the EPA’s enforcement ability.
Congress needs to address these and other enforcement issues sooner rather than later. The rules and laws are there, but they’re useless if they’re not enforced.
Technorati Tags: Big Oil, Department of the Interior, Oil Lease Fraud, Bobby Maxwell, Project on Government Oversight, Alaska Offshore Drilling
