Sex-for-Oil Scandal Rocks Interior DepartmentWell, not exactly. But something’s rotten in the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS), and if you bury your nose in it, you can detect at least a whiff of a sex scandal.
We’ve kept an eye on the debacles at MMS, which sells off the country’s oil and gas resources to energy companies like Shell Oil and ExxonMobil. With revenues around the tune of some $60 billion annually, it generates the nation’s largest source of income, behind taxes.
In recent months, reports have exposed fraudulent contracts, lax audits, and loopholes big enough to drive a tanker ship through, which are collectively thought to cost the United States billions annually.
At last count there are six active inquiries into the program being conducted by the Justice Department, the FBI, the Interior Inspector General, the Government Accountability Office, or some combination of the four. Two other investigations have already been completed which have blasted the operation for losing the government billions in dollars and being about as dysfunctional as one can imagine.
We watched all this from a distance, not sure what it all added up to. But then, buried in the 16th paragraph of a Dec. 30 New York Times article, was this:
One person familiar with the [Justice Department] investigation [into MMS] said it originally had focused on potentially improper social ties between some of Mr. Smith’s subordinates and executives at companies vying for contracts.
And we thought to ourselves, we gotta get in on this.
Now, “potentially improper social ties” is pretty euphemistic. But the phrase implies we’re not talking about a lot of other types of improper relationships between a government official and an industry executive. Accepting dinners or concert tickets? Those are gift violations. Going into business together? That’s an improper financial tie. Attending an executive’s wedding? That’s social, but it’s not improper.
Of course, we really don’t know. But what we do know about improper ties between MMS officials and Big Oil is enough to set one’s head to spinning.
According to the Times, federal investigators suspect several officials of MMS of having “consulting arrangements” with oil companies. That is, they’re taking money from the companies who are supposed to be paying the United States the highest price possible for extracting oil and gas from underneath federal land. Investigators worry that such payments might induce the officials to cut deals with the oil companies that lose the country billions of dollars.
This investigation into possible favors-for-favors (monetary or otherwise) is just part of a much larger scandal that’s emerging from MMS. Through bad contracting, lax auditing and nonexistent — possibly criminal — oversight, a picture is emerging of Interior officials either colluding with big oil companies to defraud the country on a massive scale, or dispatching their responsibilities in an abysmally negligent fashion.
So stay tuned. In the meantime, we’re looking for a good name for this scandal. Can you think of one?
