Summary: In response to a congressional request, GAO reviewed various aspects of the Mining Law of 1872, focusing on the: (1) law's patent provision; (2) law's requirement that unpatented claim holders annually perform a minimal amount of work to develop their mineral claims; and (3) amendments needed to bring the law's provisions more in line with existing national natural resource policies.
GAO found that: (1) the work requirement no longer promoted mineral development, was difficult to enforce, and occasionally resulted in land damage; (2) much of the work was difficult to verify because there was often little or no physical evidence of the work performed and the work performed did little to bring the claims closer to development; (3) some claim holders needlessly scarred the land to make it appear that they complied with the annual work requirement; and (4) replacing the annual work requirement with an annual holding fee would reduce damage to federal lands, eliminate difficult annual work requirement certification and enforcement, and result in clearance of more inactive, invalid, or abandoned claims. GAO also found that: (1) the government received less than $4,500 for 20 patents issued since 1970 that had an estimated worth of between $13.8 million and $47.9 million; (2) as of October 1987, 265 patent applications were pending for more than 80,000 acres of public land; (3) if the government patented all of the land in the 12 sites reviewed, it would receive about $16,000 for land appraised at between $14.4 million and $47.1 million; (4) although the Land Policy and Management Act requires that the government receive fair market value for disposable public lands, about 157,000 acres of public lands have passed into private ownership for the nominal mining law patent fee since 1978; and (5) the federal government has never collected revenues from the sale of hardrock minerals, as it does for fuel and common minerals, and loses the opportunity to do so when public lands pass into private ownership.
