Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Probe finds federal mine-safety agency isn't keeping track of violators who owe fines

A U.S. Department of Labor report says the agency's Mine Safety and Health Administration is not identifying coal mining "scofflaw violators" who are not paying health and safety fines, keeping operators out of debt-collection lawsuits. This report comes seven weeks after another investigation by the department's inspector general found officials had overstated their rate of required inspection completion of non-coal mines.

Ken Ward Jr. of The Charleston Gazette reports MSHA oesn't have an accurate view of the amount owed from delinquent fines as a result. "The IG's latest findings show continuing problems with MSHA's enforcement practices, following the agency's admission in 2008 that it allowed the industry to avoid required monetary penalties for 5,000 safety violations dating back more than a decade," Ward writes.

MSHA chief Joe Main said the report doesn't show a balanced portrayal of the agency's assessments and collections. "The recommendations refer to modifications of, or adherence to, MSHA internal policies and procedures that in some cases exceed federal requirements," Main wrote in an Oct. 17 memo. IG investigators found that MSHA collected 85 percent of fines in 2009 and 2010, but "did not always apply collected fines to the account of specific mine operators, or to the particular violations that drew the penalties in the first place," Ward reports.

MSHA wanted to prevent debt collection against operators who actually paid fines, but it wasn't able to match payment with fines that were due, so it created an "exclusion list" to deal with that, Ward reports. Operators on the list wouldn't "face debt-collection or other enforcement actions for unpaid fines 'because of uncertainty caused by unapplied payments.'" The agency said the list included 133 companies, but IG investigators found the list actually includes 325. The IG report says this list "did nothing to address MSHA's problem of not applying payment timely." (Read more)
On his blog, Coal Tattoo, Ward says all 325 companies on the Exclusion List "avoid having unpaid penalties sent to the Treasury for potential debt collection activities, all because MSHA doesn’t know if they’ve paid their fines or not. The IG report includes a chart that shows $4.2 million of that debt is more than 1 year overdue and another $3 million is more than two years overdue."

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