(Originally posted here)


This is obscene, fraudulent and just plain wrong. From today’s New York Times:

At a time when energy prices and industry profits are soaring, the federal government collected little more money last year than it did five years ago from the companies that extracted more than $60 billion in oil and gas from publicly owned lands and coastal waters.

If royalty payments in fiscal 2005 for natural gas had risen in step with market prices, the government would have received about $700 million more than it actually did, a three-month investigation by The New York Times has found.

But an often byzantine set of federal regulations, largely shaped and fiercely defended by the energy industry itself, allowed companies producing natural gas to provide the Interior Department with much lower sale prices - the crucial determinant for calculating government royalties - than they reported to their shareholders.

As a result, the nation’s taxpayers, collectively, the biggest owner of American oil and gas reserves, have missed much of the recent energy bonanza.
How is allowing companies to report one sales price to the government and another to shareholders not fraud? Because the Bush administration relaxed rules that now allow these companies to essential “cook the books.”

The disparities in gas prices parallel those uncovered just five years ago in a wave of scandals involving royalty payments for oil. From 1998 to 2001, a dozen major companies, while admitting no wrongdoing, paid a total of $438 million to settle charges that they had fraudulently understated their sale prices for oil.

Since then, the government has tightened its rules for oil payments. But with natural gas, the Bush administration recently loosened the rules and eased its audits intended to uncover cheating. […]

Royalties for natural gas have climbed sharply in the last three years. But while prices nearly doubled from 2001 to 2005, the $5.15 billion in gas royalties for 2005 was less than the $5.35 billion in 2001. When oil and gas are combined, royalties were about $8 billion in 2005, almost the same as in 2001.

Because much of the information about specific transactions is kept secret, it remains unclear to what extent, if at all, the weakness in royalty payments stems from deliberate cheating or from issues with the rules themselves.

> Read full article
It’s outrageous. And it’s blatant pandering to the administration’s best friends, the energy industry, who consistently stick it to Americans twice over, first as consumers and then as taxpayers with all the tax incentives and subsidies this record-profit-making industry receives from this very friendly administration. It’s another example of the fleecing of America — at the hands of a corrupt system.

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