The latest black eye for the MMS includes accounts of staff allowing industry officials to complete government inspection reports in pencil—after which regulators traced over them in pen. The IG report also found that agency workers accepted free meals, tickets to sporting events and other gifts from at least one oil company, while supposedly regulating its activities.

 

In addition, an MMS employee in the Lake Charles, Louisiana, office was allowed to inspect drilling platforms belonging to a company that he was trying to get a job with, a career quest that proved successful. Yet another inspector from the same office admitted to being under the influence of crystal methamphetamine during an inspection.

 

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who oversees the MMS, called the activities of agency employees “reprehensible” and the report itself “deeply disturbing.”

 

The Department of the Interior’s Office of the Inspector General provided the results of their findings to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Louisiana, but officials there declined prosecution.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Inspector General’s Inquiry Faults Regulators (by Ian Urbina, New York Times)

MMS District Manager to IG: "Obviously, We're All Oil Industry" (by Mandy Smithberger, Project on Government Oversight)

Report Shows Close Ties Between Rig Inspectors, Oil Industry (by David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post)

Investigative Report - Island Operating Company, et. al. (Department of the Interior, Inspector General) (pdf)