Nick Snow
OGJ Washington Editor
WASHINGTON, DC, Oct. 1 -- The US Department of the Interior formally established the Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR), moving the responsibility from its Bureau of Offshore Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOE) to its Office of the Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management, and Budget.
The Oct. 1 move was part of Interior Sec. Ken Salazar’s reorganization of the former US Minerals Management Service. It was designed to separate revenue collection from leasing and enforcement and eliminate potential conflicts of interest at what now is BOE.
DOI said the ONRR division will replace MMS’s former Minerals Revenue Management Program, collecting and disbursing energy production revenue on federal and American Indian lands onshore and the US Outer Continental Shelf offshore. It said that the program disbursed more than $10.6 billion in 2009 to the US Treasury, various state and tribal accounts, and special use accounts such as the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
ONRR also will be responsible for auditing and compliance, investigation and enforcement, and management of federal and tribal assets onshore and offshore, according to DOI.
It said improvements already made include implementing a risk-based compliance strategy to strengthen auditing and compliance efforts, hiring new auditors to bolster these efforts, and installing new electronic software and computing system to automatically detect company errors so the errors can be corrected quickly.
ONRR also will have a data-mining effort to use as a second-level screening process, authority to pursue more fines and other remedies if companies knowingly underpay or submit inaccurate royalty or production reports, and the ability to distribute revenue to tribes and individual American Indian owners more promptly, DOI said.
Salazar said DOI is beginning a strategic review to identify opportunities to further improve performance in all ONRR operations. The agency has approximately 600 employees. Its headquarters are in Washington, but most of its operation is at the Denver Federal Center in Lakewood, Colo., with field offices in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico.
Contact Nick Snow at [email protected].
