The Interior Department’s notoriously clunky program to track oil and gas activity on public lands has cost the agency millions of dollars in lost productivity, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday.
The GAO blamed the program’s failure partly on a “lack of effective leadership and oversight.” The program cost $40 million to put together and has burned through $19 million in lost productivity because it is so time consuming to use, according to the report.
“The extent of the system’s problems was so severe that Interior could not use the new system as the system of record for oil and gas activities, relying instead on paper records,” the GAO said in the report.
Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which oversees energy on federal land, began working in 2013 on a new program to track activity like oil and gas permitting. The Automated Fluid Minerals Support System 2, or AFMSS 2, replaced a system that was developed in the 1990s. It was fully deployed by 2021.
