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Blowing the Whistle on Big Oil
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: December 5th, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/business/yourmoney/03whist...
During a 22-year career, Bobby L. Maxwell routinely won accolades and awards as one of the Interior Departments best auditors in the nations oil patch. Mr. Maxwells career has been characterized by exceptional performance and significant contributions, wrote Gale A. Norton, then the secretary of the interior, in a 2003 citation. Less than two years later, the Interior Department eliminated his job. That came exactly one week after a federal judge in Denver unsealed a lawsuit in which Mr. Maxwell contended that a major oil company had spent years cheating on royalty payments. Invoking a law that rewards private citizens who expose fraud against the government, Mr. Maxwell has filed a suit [which] contends that the Interior Department ignored audits indicating that Kerr-McGee was cheating. Maxwell says his first serious doubts about the Interior Department originated in 1998, when the agency reluctantly began to investigate accusations of systematic cheating on royalties for oil. Several of the nations biggest oil companies eventually settled that investigation by paying nearly $440 million. Mr. Maxwell said, There have always been people who dont want to pursue things. But now its grown into a major illness. Broader investigations by Congress and the Interior Departments own inspector general [are investigating] whether the agency properly collects the money for oil and gas pumped from public land. The Interior Departments inspector general told a House subcommittee in September that senior officials at the agency had repeatedly glossed over ethical lapses. Short of crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior, declared Earl E. Devaney, the inspector general.
Note: If you want to understand how corruption can grow and fester in large government agencies, this entire article is highly educational and revealing.
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