Summary: Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of the Interior's Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement's (OSMRE) 1988 reconciliation of the Abandoned Mine Reclamation Fund, commonly known as the Abandoned Mine Land (AML) Fund.
GAO found that OSMRE: (1) established the AML Grants Tracking System in 1986 to record federal and state share contributions toward AML Fund grants; (2) did not perform a complete reconciliation of the AML Fund, since it did not correct past tracking system errors in determining state share balances; (3) did not correct key data errors in its formulas for calculating state grant allocations; (4) limited its fund reconciliation to agreement with its official accounting records' overall fund balance, collections, and grant data; and (5) could not accurately use its tracking system to determine federal and state share percentages of grant charges. GAO also found that OSMRE did not have adequate internal controls over its grant allocation process, since it: (1) could not substantiate the federal share of the state reclamation program grants listed in its tracking system; and (2) lacked policies and procedures for recreating and verifying its past allocation decisions. GAO believes that the incorrect state share balances will affect not only the current-year grant allocations, but also future-year allocations.
