Surface Mining

In response to a congressional request, GAO provided information on federally approved mine inspection and enforcement programs in four states to determine whether: (1) the states were citing all violations observed during mine inspections; and (2) if the Department of the Interior's Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement's (OSMRE) sampling process to select mines for review is appropriate for assessing states' performance in citing mining violations.

GAO found that: (1) the states made most of the required inspections and ensured that mine operators timely corrected cited violations; (2) state inspectors failed to cite 78 of the 129 total violations GAO and federal inspectors observed during visits to 82 sites; (3) 56 percent of the uncited violations included problems with sediment controls, mining outside permit boundaries, improper topsoil handling, and other violations that could cause off-site environmental damage; (4) states did not cite the 78 violations because they missed the violations or disagreed that a violation existed; (5) states did not issue violation notices if problems were not occurring when they followed up; and (6) states' failures to record all violations could affect penalty determinations and permit suspensions or revocations, since OSMRE bases its decisions on an operator's history of violations. GAO also found that federal inspectors: (1) did not determine if the violations they found were also present during the last state inspection; (2) did not attempt to schedule oversight inspections as close to the latest complete state inspection as possible; and (3) were not required to determine the potential environmental impact of observed violations or their likely causes.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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