The Office of Inspector General within the Department of Energy has published a report from its recent audit of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Natural Gas Certification Process (a.k.a. a FERC Certificate). Excerpts from that report include:
- While nothing came to our attention to indicate that natural gas certification applications had been inappropriately approved or disapproved, FERC can take steps to improve aspects of the natural gas certification process
- . . . we identified four areas for improvement that, if addressed, could aid FERC in more efficiently and effectively managing its natural gas certification process:
- Process Transparency
- Public Access to FERC Records
- Tracking Stakeholder Comments
- Data Integrity
- The process transparency and public access issues that we identified above occurred, in part, because FERC had not specifically designed its public-facing systems for use by the general public.
- Management concurred with the report’s recommendations and indicated that it had either initiated or planned corrective actions to address the issues identified in the report.
The full report can be found here.