Federal mine safety regulators had quietly warned Congress just two weeks before last spring's Upper Big Branch mine disaster about serious enforcement lapses.

On March 25, 2010, the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration submitted a required report from its internal Office of Accountability to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

According to the report, over the past two years auditors from the accountability office had found that inspectors in 20 of the 25 field offices reviewed did not properly evaluate the negligence of mine operator safety and health violations and that supervisors in 21 of those offices did not perform in-depth reviews to make sure that inspectors took appropriate enforcement actions.

The report also said MSHA officials in 15 of the 25 field offices audited did not document inspections well enough for any enforcement actions taken to stand up in court.

These findings and others in the report mirror those of many MSHA internal reviews conducted after major mining disasters over the past 20 years. They also par with repeated criticism from the Labor Department inspector general and the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

MSHA said in the report that the accountability reviews focused on field offices where agency officials thought there were problems. "Therefore, MSHA does not believe that these findings are an indication of a systematic problem across the 92 field offices," but "an expected result of successful targeting of audits to potential problem areas," the report says.

The report did not list the field offices that were audited nor did it identify the ones where problems were found (Ken Ward Jr., Charleston [W.Va.] Gazette, March. 2). -- AS