Last November, Interior Assistant Secretary C. Stephen Allred announced under a swirl of controversy that he had commissioned a new Subcommittee on Royalty Management "to review and provide advice to the department on aspects of mineral revenue collection from federal and Indian lands." But, the Congress, the GAO, and the Interior Inspector General all had open investigations into the very topic of how and why the taxpayer was being deprived of billions of dollars in oil and gas drilling fees known as royalties. So, it did cause some to wonder why another review was needed.
Then came the kerfuffle over who exactly was to chair the new Subcommittee. At first, it was reported that a former longtime American Petroleum Institute lobbyist/lawyer would chair the Subcommittee. The news was, well, a bit like pouring gasoline over the fire. Senator Wyden, for one, asked: "How does it send a message of independence to put at the head of your new watchdog group, somebody with that background?"
Behind the scenes, concerns were raised about whether it was wise to have oil industry confidants probing the enforcement methodologies used by Interior to find and collect from oil companies cheating on their royalty payments. In March, Interior Secretary Kempthorne announced the members of the Subcommittee had been selected. In a noticeable improvement to earlier prospects, the members were to be mostly current or former public or elected officials.
The Royalty Management Subcommittee's first meeting, held today in Washington, DC, will be closed to the public. It is certainly perfectly legal under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) for a Subcommittee to have private meetings. However, it is also not the preferable way for a Subcommittee to operate, particularly when dealing with an issue of great interest to the public and the Congress, as is the case here. In addition, Subcommittees are not to be used as a venue for preventing public insight into deliberations.
In response to my letter requesting that the Subcommittee's meetings be open, Assistant Secretary Allred wrote that Subcommittees like this one "are subject to FACA only under very limited circumstances. Accordingly, once the Subcommittee completes its work, its report will be presented to the Royalty Policy Committee at an open meeting."
Yet according to the General Services Administration, which sets FACA rules, "it is not permissable for a parent advisory committee simply to 'rubber-stamp' the advice or recommendations of their subcommittees, thereby depriving the public of its opportunity to know about, and participate contemporaneously in an advisory committee's deliberations. Agencies are cautioned to avoid excluding the public from attending any meeting where a subcommittee develops advice or recommendations that are to be reviewed and considered by the parent advisory committee before being submitted to a Federal officer or agency. These exclusions may run counter to the provisions of the Act that require contemporaneous access to the advisory committee deliberative process."
-- Beth Daley
Comments