California Controller John Chiang demands funding for the federal auditors of oil leases in in California, whose legwork hauls in unpaid royalty money that is split 50-50 with the state. In a no-holds-barred letter to the House Natural Resources Committee, Chiang lays out the damage done to state school funding by royalty losses and excoriates the Bush Interior Department: "Almost without exception, when this Interior Department had to choose between collecting money for the schoolchildren of California and giving it to the oil companies, they chose the oil companies."
He asks the House Committee to get the funding of auditors restored and cancel Interior ‘s new policy of "audits" that depend on oil company documents, without any further search for the truth.
This is Chiang’s second dust-up with oil companies in two weeks. The last was a letter to the state employee pension fund warning that a bid by San Ramon-based Chevron to buy up assets of the bankrupt Russian oil company Yukos could cause problems for the fund, since Chevron is among its top-20 stocks.