Are there no limits to the taxpayer-funded handouts to Big Oil? Everything within this administration is about helping the special interests who finance their campaigns.
The accusations, many of them in four lawsuits that were unsealed last week by federal judges in Oklahoma, represent a rare rebellion by government investigators against their own agency.The auditors contend that they were blocked by their bosses from pursuing more than $30 million in fraudulent underpayments of royalties for oil produced in publicly owned waters in the Gulf of Mexico.
"The agency has lost its sense of mission, which is to protect American taxpayers,"said Bobby L. Maxwell, who was formerly in charge of Gulf of Mexico auditing. "These are assets that belong to the American public, and they are supposed to be used for things like education, public infrastructure and roadways."
Who needs education and infrastructure anyway
The new accusations surfaced just one week after the Interior Department's inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, told a House subcommittee that "short of crime, anything goes" at the top levels of the Interior Department.
In two of the lawsuits, two senior auditors with the Minerals Management Service in Oklahoma City said they were ordered to drop their claim that Shell Oil had fraudulently shortchanged taxpayers out of $18 million.
A third auditor, also in Oklahoma City, charged that senior officials in Denver ordered him to drop his demand that two dozen companies pay $1 million in back interest.
And in a suit that was filed in 2004, Mr. Maxwell charged that senior officials in Washington ordered him not to press claims that the Kerr-McGee Corporation had cheated the government out of $12 million in royalties.
