BLM Left $995,385 in Helium Royalties on the Table

Every gas stream pulled from Federal land that contains helium belongs, by law, to the United States -- and the Bureau of Land Management⧉ is supposed to collect royalties on it.▸ A nine-person team in BLM's Amarillo, Texas field office, the Federal Leased Lands (FLL) team, has run that job since 1991. A February 2026 inspection by the Interior Department's Office of Inspector General⧉ -- the department's independent internal watchdog, whose findings the bureau must formally answer -- found the team collected $165.8 million in royalties from 14 companies over fiscal years 2020 through 2024 -- and, for most of the 30-plus years it has existed, did so with no written procedures for identifying wells, tracking agreements, chasing nonpayment, or auditing the companies that pay. OIG's tally of what that gap cost: $995,385.

The FLL team operates on nonappropriated funds generated from the royalties it collects -- any excess goes to the U.S. Treasury.▸ The program's December 2024 Program Review -- the first review BLM had ever conducted on it, performed by three BLM staff outside the FLL team -- found no written manual and no systematic method for identifying new wells; the OIG report quotes it describing production discoveries happening "randomly through news articles ... a call to the BLM ... or email inquir[ies]." The Interior OIG's own inspection reached the same conclusion: BLM did not always identify, track, collect, or properly oversee Federal Helium Program royalties. As the BLM New Mexico State Office's Deputy State Director for Minerals put it, the team existed "in the shadow" with limited oversight.

BLM's own helium agreements require companies to report additions and deletions to their well lists every January, and let BLM assess a $1,000 penalty for every year a company skips it.▸ The FLL team has never assessed that penalty on a single company. OIG calculated that doing so during the five-year review window alone would have collected at least $48,000. The same gap in tracking meant the FLL team accepted $3.1 million in royalty payments from seven companies that had no helium agreement with BLM in place at all -- payments the team had no formal basis to verify as correct or hold the payer accountable for.

Five companies stopped sending royalty payments at various points since 2014, some for as long as a decade, before OIG's inspection even asked about it.▸ When the FLL Branch Chief was asked for a list of delinquent payers, it took seven weeks to produce a one-page document -- built for the inspection, not from any regular tracking -- estimating $851,000 potentially owed. The document's own explanation for the nonpayment: "more research required." As of May 2025, BLM still had no plan to pursue any of it.

The FLL team calls its royalty checks "audits," but OIG found staff never independently verified the production figures companies reported -- they simply checked that a company's royalty payment matched the production volume the same company had claimed.▸ Over the five-year scope, the team audited only 6 of the 14 paying companies, and spent 78% of its audit time on companies that accounted for under 6% of total royalties. The eight audits it completed took an average of 267 days and recovered an average of $7,059 each -- $56,475 total against nearly $160 million in royalties⧉ paid by the companies audited, a 0.04% return. Exclude the single audit that found real money, and the other seven combined turned up $9.50: one review found $0.87 owed by the company; another ended with the government paying the company $35.50 back. OIG put the salary cost of running these unverified checks at $96,385 a year.

BLM concurred with six of OIG's seven recommendations, including compliance reviews aimed at recovering the $851,000 in potential delinquencies and a new risk-based audit approach that conforms to the practices its sister royalty office already uses for oil and gas.▸ It did not concur with recovering the $48,000 in never-assessed reporting penalties, telling OIG that "conducting a retrospective analysis to identify companies that failed to submit annual well listings would require a disproportionate amount of staff time and resources relative to the estimated amount of uncollected penalties."⧉ OIG disagreed, noting BLM already has the well and agreement data needed and calling the recommendation unresolved. The figures independently reappear in the DOI OIG's semiannual report to Congress⧉ covering the same period, with the same $995,385 total.