U.S. Forest Service

Through special-use permits, the Forest Service authorizes various recreational activities within the nation's forests, including hunting, fishing, rafting, and lodging. Since 1993, GAO has issued several reports concluding that the Forest Service does not routinely charge fees reflecting the fair market value for many of the larger, commercial activities within the nation's forests, such as ski concessions and mountain-top sites for radio and TV broadcasting. Similarly, the Forest Service's recreation special-use program is not receiving fair market value or recovering its costs, largely because of its relatively low priority and the lack of incentives to address its critical needs. The program would achieve a more businesslike approach if the individual forest managers were allowed to keep recovered revenue to offset the costs incurred for this program, However, permitting the Forest Service to retain fees might raise questions of oversight and accountability, as well as scoring and compliance issues under the Budget Enforcement Act. These matters need to be weighed in considering fee retention proposals.

GAO found that: (1) in many instances, the Forest Service is not getting fair market fees for commercial and noncommercial recreation special-use permits; (2) the Forest Service's fee system that sets fees for most commercial uses has not been updated in nearly 30 years and generally limits fees to less than 3 percent of a permittee's gross revenues; (3) in comparison, fees for similar commercial uses of nearby state-held land average 5 to 15 percent of a permittee's gross revenues; (4) fees for holders of recreation residence permits are based on out-of-date assessments of the value of the land and, as a result, fees for many of these permit holders are lower than they should be on the basis of current market conditions; (5) while the Forest Service has been authorized to recover costs incurred in reviewing and processing all types of special-use permit applications since as far back as 1952, it has not done so; (6) on the basis of Service-provided information, GAO estimated that in 1994 the costs to review and process special-use permits were about $13 million, but this would not represent the cost to run the entire program, which also includes activities such as annual billing, conducting inspections, and training staff; (7) Service officials acknowledge that because they do not have a cost accounting system, they do not know the cost of administering all aspects of the special-use permit program; (8) the lack of priority given to the program by agency management and the lack of incentives to correct known problems contribute to the Service's problems in collecting fees and recovering costs; (9) as a result, resources needed to improve known program weaknesses have not been made available; and (10) since additional fees collected would generally be returned to the U.S. Treasury and not benefit the forest, there is a lack of incentive for the Service to dedicate the additional resources to address these issues.

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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