quote:
Blame!Who gets blamed for despoiling our beloved gulf ? WE could blame the past administrations ,Daddy Bush, Clinton,and the ever popular "Dub" Bush.
Someone who believes in the cult of omnipotent Presidential power could blame past presidents in some matters, but not this time. The Minerals Management Service was investigated by the past administration by the OIG for malfeasance and some officials were indicted. It was this administrations job to create a new and improved MMS and they failed. I am sure that many of those bad union and federal law protected guv'ment workers were hired in previous administrations
quote:
MMS is the branch of the Interior Department that handles leases and regulation of oil drilling and mineral exploration, both offshore and on U.S. land. It has come under fire and scrutiny lately as a report from the Interior Dept.'s inspector general detailed a widespread culture problem at MMS. Companies MMS regulated took employees to sporting events, bought them meals and lavish gifts. Employees in the Lake Charles and New Orleans offices viewed porn at work. It sounded pretty bad.
All of these ethical failures happened during the previous administration. The report examined MMS employees' activity prior to 2007, though the porn viewing occurred from 2005-2009.
http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...rvice-resigns/57344/ quote:
A Culture of Ethical Failure
The single-most serious problem our investigations revealed is a pervasive culture of exclusivity, exempt from the rules that govern all other employees of the Federal Government.
In the matter involving Ms. Dennet, Mr. Mayberry and Milton Dial, the results of this investigation paint a disturbing picture of three Senior Executives who were good friends, and who remained calculatedly ignorant of the rules governing post-employment restrictions, conflicts of interest and Federal Acquisition Regulations to ensure that two lucrative MMS contracts would be awarded to the company created by Mr. Mayberry - Federal Business
Solutions - and later joined by Mr. Dial. Ms. Dennet manipulated the contracting process from the start. She worked directly with the contracting officer, personally participated on the evaluation team for both contracts, asked for an increase to the first contract amount, and had
Mayberry prepare the justification for the contract increase. Ms. Dennet also appears to have shared with Mr. Mayberry the Key Qualification criteria upon which bidders would be judged, two weeks before bid proposals on the first contract were due.
In the other two cases, the results of our investigation reveal a program tasked with implementing a "business model" program. As such, Royalty in Kind (RIK) marketers donned a private sector approach to essentially everything they did. This included effectively opting themselves out of the Ethics in Government Act, both in practice, and, at one point, even explored doing so by policy or regulation.
Not only did those in RIK consider themselves special, they were treated as special by their management. For reasons that are not at all clear, the reporting hierarchy of RIK bypassed the one supervisor whose integrity remained intact throughout, Debra Gibbs-Tschudy, the Deputy Associate Director in Denver, where RIK is located. Rather, R1K was reporting directly to Associate Director Dennet, who was located some 1500 miles away in Washington, DC, and to whom the unbridled, unethical conduct of RIK employees was apparently invisible (although the Associate Director had been made aware of the plan by RIK to explore more formal exemption from the ethics rules.)
More specifically, we discovered that between 2002 and 2006, nearly 1/3 of the entire
RIK staff socialized with, and received a wide array of gifts and gratuities from, oil and gas companies with whom RIK was conducting official business. While the dollar amount of gifts and gratuities was not enormous, these employees accepted gifts with prodigious frequency. In particular, two RIK marketers received combined gifts and gratuities on at least 135 occasions from four major oil and gas companies with whom they were doing business - a textbook example of improperly receiving gifts from prohibited sources. When confronted by our investigators, none of the employees involved displayed remorse.
We also discovered a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity in the RIK program - both within the program, including a supervisor, Greg Smith, who engaged in illegal drug use and had sexual relations with subordinates, and in consort with industry. Internally, several staff admitted to illegal drug use as well as illicit sexual encounters. Alcohol abuse appears to have been a problem when RIK staff socialized with industry. For example, two RIK staff accepted lodging from industry after industry events because they were too intoxicated to drive home or to their hotel. These same RIK marketers also engaged in brief sexual relationships with industry contacts. Sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length.
Finally, we discovered that two of the RIK employees who accepted gifts also held inappropriate outside employment and failed to properly report the income they received from this work on their financial disclosure forms. Smith, in particular, deliberately secreted the true nature of his outside employment - he pitched oil and gas companies that did business with RIK to hire the outside consulting firm - to prevent revealing what would otherwise, at a minimum, be a clear conflict of interest.
http://www.doioig.gov/upload/S...h%20transmittal1.txt