The federal government has fined one of the country’s largest energy producers more than $2.1 million for under-reporting natural gas production on Native American leases.
In 2011, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue issued Chesapeake Energy an order to restructure its accounting practices in order to correct unreported and misreported volumes on land leased by Native American individuals and tribes.
Paul Mussenden, the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Natural Resources Revenue Management, said in a statement Chesapeake assured ONRR it had fixed the problem by 2012, but follow-up checks by the federal government found more uncorrected volume shortages in 2013.
“Correct royalty reports, especially on American Indian leases, are essential for ONRR to ensure all royalties are paid, to provide reliable data used by ONRR’s audit and compliance teams, and to provide accurate data to the American public,” Mussenden said in a statement. “Accordingly, the ONRR audit and enforcement teams will continue their vigilance in ensuring that companies timely comply with orders to correct erroneous data to avoid expending limited federal resources chasing correct information.”
The federal agency handed out more than $13 billion to states, tribes, and individual Native American mineral owners in fiscal year 2014.
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