Oil program: Broad failures in collecting payments

Inspector Finds Broad Failures in Oil Program - New York Times

In one case, senior officials decided that it would impose a “hardship” on oil companies to demand that they calculate the back interest they owed after having been caught underpaying. The agency itself was years behind in billing the companies, because its computers could not perform the calculations.

How can it be that our government cannot collect payments, in a proper and timely way, from oil and gas companies? They sure can collect my taxes! And, I believe, their computer can compute, and collect, any interest I owe them on that debt. Is it because "the numbers are just too big?" I say that tongue-in-cheek, of course, but maybe there's some truth to the claim...the numbers are too big in that there's a lot of, um, grease lubricating the wheels.

It must be great to be an oil company.