GAO recommends updates, reviews of BLM’s oil and gas lease suspensions
In a review of the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) oil and gas lease suspension measures, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found a lack of monitoring or collection of data related to why those suspensions were put in place initially.
“We recommended that BLM develop a procedure to monitor lease suspensions and that it track the reasons for suspensions in its database,” the GAO report said.
At stake are billions of dollars in revenue for the government, stemming from corporate leases on federal land. While leaseholders traditionally have 10 years to begin drilling, those efforts can be suspended near indefinitely — and payments stopped — if BLM suspends the lease over things like permit issues or environmental reviews. By the end of 2016, GAO found that 16 states had oil and gas leases suspended, but the lack of oversight surrounding them — including not requiring reasons be filed in BLM’s databases — made it difficult to determine why they were suspended.
The only way around this, GAO found, was a review of the official leave files. Given that many of these are in hard copy, it is no mean feat. Further exacerbating the trouble is that BLM state offices typically delegate responsibility for monitoring to field offices, and the officials at those locations told GAO interviewers that monitoring varied from every few months to rarely to not at all, seemingly on a whim. Given that they have full discretion on how they wish to monitor, it is not likely to change without a procedural update.
GAO made four recommendations for how to proceed to which the Department of Interior agreed. The most basic of these is that any new database should include a field for recording suspension reasonings. Others include the creation of procedures for monitoring oil and gas lease suspensions, requiring top-level reviews of field offices’ monitoring efforts and ensuring the creation of mechanisms to assist officials with oversight of their field offices.
