Word: interiorities
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Complaints are beginning to pile up against the U.S. Interior Department. And they're coming not just from outside critics but also from people in the agency. The problems surfacing are serious: managerial incompetence, bureaucratic snafus that are costing taxpayers billions of dollars, and a pervasive forgive-and-forget attitude toward senior department officials who cross ethical lines...
...Project on Government Oversight, a private watchdog group, released a study this week charging that Interior's Minerals and Management Service (MMS) has become far more lax the past four years in collecting unpaid royalties from the land it leases to oil and natural gas companies. From 2002 to 2005, MMS's auditing and compliance division collected $48 million not paid on mineral leases, which is "less than half the average $115 million collected annually in the division's first 20 years," according to Beth Daley, the watchdog organization's director of investigations. The drop in collections, Daley says, came...
...watchdog group's beef with Interior is tepid compared with the blast delivered a day earlier by the department's own inspector general, Earl Devaney. In scorching testimony before a House Government Reform subcommittee the no-nonsense Devaney charged that during his seven years as Interior's IG his revelations of misdeeds and foul-ups have been routinely "disregarded by the department." Numerous IG reports on regulations circumvented, procurement irregularities, project failures and bureaucrats being awarded bonuses despite their failures have been met with "vehement challenges" by Interior officials "to the quality of our audits, evaluations and investigations," he told...
...past $36 a barrel. (Oil currently sells for more than $60 a barrel.) But because of a foul-up in drafting the deepwater leases, 1,000 of them issued in 1998 and 1999 didn't contain the language lifting the exemption for higher prices. And, Devaney says, mid-level Interior bureaucrats kept their superiors in the dark about the omission for five years. The Government Accountability Office estimates that the mistake has so far cost taxpayers $2 billion in lost royalty revenue and that number could eventually soar to $10 billion...
...Auburn St. eatery has also shed the dingy interior that was a hallmark of the old Tommy’s in favor of brand new green and wood-paneled furniture and two flat-panel television sets, both of which feature cable television...