Inspectors with the Minerals Management Service -- charged with enforcing safety and environmental rules on offshore rigs -- routinely took gifts from the companies they were supposed to be policing, including hunting trips, college football tickets and meals, according to a new report.
The report, released Tuesday by the Interior Department's inspector general, does not directly relate to the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which sank after an explosion April 20 and set off a massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It details misconduct in the service's Lake Charles, La., office, which oversaw a different region of the gulf, and covers up to 2008, before the problem well was approved.
But the report adds to a growing portrait of the Minerals Management Service as corrupted by industry: Many inspectors, the inspector general found, were already friends with industry officials. Some had worked in the oil and gas business before their stint in government, and would again. One official inspected four platforms owned by one company at the same time he was negotiating for a job at that firm.
The result, the report found, was regulation that often looked less than rigorous. One confidential source, it said, told investigators that service inspectors let the oil and gas companies fill out their own inspection forms -- in pencil. Then an inspector would trace over their writing in ink.
"Of greatest concern to me is the environment in which these inspectors operate -- particularly the ease with which they move between industry and government," Mary L. Kendall, the Interior Department's acting inspector general, said in a cover letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.
Salazar said he was concerned enough about the findings to ask Kendall to expand her investigation and try to determine whether similar activities took place during the Obama administration.