Interior needs scrutiny.

Byline: The Register-Guard

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden is rightly calling for Senate hearings on allegations that Department of Interior administrators blocked auditors' efforts to require energy companies to pay the government its rightful share of revenue from oil drilling on public lands.

The allegations come at a time when oil companies are reporting gargantuan profits and Americans are feeling pain at the pump. They focus on an agency that, under Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne's predecessor, Gale Norton, gained a reputation for its wobbly ethics and its agenda of giving oil, gas, mining and timber interests unprecedented access to public lands.

Wyden wants Kempthorne to appear before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to explain what he has done to clean up the department's ethical problems. That's a start, but the panel should also grill Kempthorne and other top Interior officials on the recent auditors' allegations, which surfaced in lawsuits charging that the oil companies defrauded the government.

Allegations that Interior officials favored Big Oil are hardly surprising, given President Bush's six years of appointments of former energy industry executives and lobbyists to key Interior posts. An indication of how bad things have gotten came last week when the department's own inspector general complained of its "anything goes" ethical culture.

The inspector general, Earl Devaney, reported on drilling leases signed in the late 1990s, under the Clinton administration. Because of what Devaney characterized as agency bungling - not favoritism - the eight- to 10-year leases did not require royalty payments if the price of oil topped $36 a barrel. Since the leases were signed, oil prices have at times soared to more than twice the amount of that cap.

Devaney says the agency, under the Bush administration, has attempted to cover up the contracts, which the Government Accountability Office estimates could cost U.S. taxpayers $10 billion in lost royalties. Among the many questions that senators should ask Kempthorne is why those contracts shouldn't be renegotiated. If necessary, the government can use the leverage of future leases to bring any foot-dragging oil companies to the table.

Meanwhile, the Project on Government Oversight, a private watchdog group, recently released a study charging that the department's Minerals and Management Service has become lax in collecting unpaid royalties from the lands it leases to energy companies. For example, the service's compliance division collected only $48 million in unpaid mineral leases from 2002 to 2005. That's less than half the yearly average of $115 million that the service collected over the past 20 years.

Then there's the troubling case of Steven Griles, who served as deputy secretary of Interior during Bush's first term. In 2004, Inspector General Devaney identified more than two dozen possible ethics violations involving Griles. The Office of Government Ethics referred two to then-Secretary Gale Norton, who declined to take any action against Griles.

Kempthorne, who succeeded Norton last July, says he takes the allegations of unethical behavior "very seriously." That's nice to hear, but the department's troubled history suggests that Wyden is justified in pushing for hearings to make certain that Interior is fulfilling its obligation to hold this country's natural resources in sacred trust.