Wall St.Journal 27Feb2020

A2| Thursday, February 27, 2020 ** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Asylum seekersmade up
the majority of migrants
crossing the U.S. southern bor-
der last year, according to the

Migration Policy Institute. A

Jan. 14 U.S. News article about

immigration policy said the

past half-decade.

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[email protected] by calling 888-410-2667.

CORRECTIONSAMPLIFICATIONS

U.S. NEWS

on the oil industry. But the in-

ternal correspondence could

prove a liability, as environ-

mental groups challenge the

agency’s rationale for its deci-

sion, legal experts say.

“What these communications

show is that the agency was not

relying on expertise,” said Rich-

ard Revesz, dean emeritus of

New York University School of

Law and an expert on environ-

mental and regulatory legal

matters. “It was making a polit-

ical decision that went against

the advice of the experts.”

A spokesman for Mr. An-

gelle, a former Louisiana state

official and ally of the Gulf

Coast oil industry, said the rule

changes were handled properly.

“The 2019 Well Control Rule

was created after an internal

deliberative process that is

well reflected in the Bureau’s

internal deliberative docu-

ments,” the spokesman said.

“It is unfortunate that anyone

would try to argue otherwise

using leaked documents that

failed to reflect the entirety of

the process. The final rule ad-

vances America’s energy inde-

pendence while maintaining

the highest safety standards of

environmental protections.”

A coalition of environmen-

tal groups, including the Si-

erra Club and the Natural Re-

sources Defense Council, sued

in federal court last year over

the changes. They argued that

BSEE “failed to provide any

good reason or rational basis

for retreating” from the origi-

nal well-control rule, which

was passed in 2016.

The correspondence re-

viewed by the Journal, along

with interviews with current

and former officials in the

safety bureau, reveals internal

deliberations on the well-con-

trol rule that aren’t reflected

in the final decision memos.

The decision memos are in-

tended to show how rules de-

velop through a reasoned deci-

sion-making process, forming

the basis of the agency’s de-

fense against a challenge, legal

experts said.

One decision memo, dated

Sept. 15, focused on what the

industry calls drilling mar-

gin—the amount of pressure

drillers are required to main-

tain while drilling a well to

prevent blowouts. A surge of

high pressure led to the Deep-

water Horizon blowout and ex-

plosion in April 2010, killing 11

workers and spewing more

than 130 million gallons of oil

into the Gulf of Mexico.

Staff wanted to “keep pro-

posed language as is,” the

memo said. Industry pressured

Mr. Angelle to eliminate the

standard to give drillers

greater flexibility.

The memo noted that “BSEE

does not agree with industry”

that a proposed alternative

safety standard, drafted by the

American Petroleum Institute,

“provides adequate methods

for all possible situations.”

Those lines were deleted af-

ter Mr. Angelle weighed in, ac-

cording to email correspon-

dence and revised versions of

the memos dated Oct. 16.

The original memos also

note that engineering staffers

had argued for “no change to

the testing frequency” of

blowout preventers—mechani-

cal devices that seal off a well

in the case of a blowout. The

blowout preventer failed on

the Deepwater Horizon, and

the Obama administration’s

subsequent well-control rule

mandated that the devices be

tested every 14 days.

The oil industry fought such

frequent testing, which costs

drillers money and interrupts

drilling activity. The industry

wanted the mandate changed to

require testing every 21 days, a

shift the agency said would save

drillers $525 million a year.

Language—noting the staff

opposition and labeling the 21-

day proposal an “industry rec-

ommendation”—was deleted

from the memos after Mr. An-

gelle’s intervention, the re-

cords show.

“Over the past day the Direc-

tor has asked the [well-control

rule] team to revise” the memos

about blowout preventer testing

and drilling margin “to revise/

remove the WCR team recom-

mendations,” BSEE petroleum

engineer Kirk Malstrom wrote

in an Oct. 16 email. Mr. Angelle

“verbally instructed” the team

to endorse an option to relax

the drilling-margin minimum,

as oil-industry trade groups

were urging, he wrote.

On Oct. 22, Mr. Malstrom

wrote to colleagues that Mr.

Angelle had called him to tell

him to move ahead with lan-

guage adopting the 21-day

testing requirement.

WASHINGTON—As the off-
shore oil industry’s federal
regulator completed its over-
haul of a major well-drilling
safety rule in 2018, the
agency’s director picked up
the phone to a staff engineer
to order up some changes.
Scott Angelle, director of
the Bureau of Safety and Envi-
ronmental Enforcement, told
the engineer to delete language
from memos showing that the
changes would contradict guid-
ance from the agency’s own
engineers, according to emails
and memos reviewed by The
Wall Street Journal.
The memos were subse-
quently revised but with no in-
dication that Mr. Angelle had
personally ordered the
changes, the records show.
Among the details stripped:
a note that agency staffers
wanted “no change to the test-
ing frequency” of critical safety
equipment and that the staff
“does not agree with industry”
that an industry-crafted proto-
col for managing well pressure
was sufficient in all situations,
the records show.
The Trump administration
has made no secret of its goal
to reduce regulatory burdens

BYTEDMANN

Warnings on Oil-Drilling Rule Deleted

The regulator’s head

ordered that staff

objections to changes

be cut from memos.

U.S. WATCH

is the largest criminal fine im-

posed under the act, U.S. Attor-

ney for Massachusetts Andrew

Lelling said. He said NiSource

also agreed to implement safety

procedures at pipelines it owns

in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Mary-

land, Kentucky and other states.

A Columbia Gas spokesman

said the company took full re-

sponsibility for the events of

September 2018. “Today’s reso-

lution with the U.S. Attorney’s

Office is an important part of

addressing the impact,” he said.

—Jennifer Levitz

CALIFORNIA

Tech Platforms Can

Censor, Court Says

A federal appeals court in

California on Wednesday ruled

that privately operated internet

platforms are free to censor

PHILADELPHIA

Nonprofit Poised to

Open Drug-Use Site

A Philadelphia nonprofit plans
to open the nation’s first sanc-
tioned, supervised site for drug
users next week, despite contin-
ued objections from the U.S. Jus-
tice Department.
The group, Safehouse, said
Wednesday that it would open
its first site in South Philadelphia.
A federal judge on Tuesday is-
sued a favorable judgment for
the nonprofit in a lawsuit brought
by the local U.S. attorney’s office,
which has sought to block super-
vised drug-use sites.
The U.S. attorney’s office said
it is mounting an appeal.
“We believe we can open
there, we can begin to provide
services,” said Ronda Goldfein, a
co-founder and vice president of
Safehouse, of the South Philadel-
phia area.
Advocates believe these places
help save lives. The sites would
allow drug use under supervision
of people who can treat over-
doses and potentially help steer
drug users toward treatment.
—Jon Kamp

MASSACHUSETTS

Utility to Plead Guilty

In 2018 Gas Blasts

Columbia Gas of Massachu-
setts has agreed to plead guilty
to a federal criminal charge and
pay a $53 million fine after
deadly gas explosions and fires
rocked three communities north
of Boston in 2018, federal offi-
cials said Wednesday.
NiSource, the parent com-
pany, has also agreed to sell its
operations in Massachusetts as
a result of the disaster in which
an 18-year-old man died and
nearly 25 others were injured.
Combustible fuel leaked into
homes in Lawrence, Andover
and North Andover, damaging
130 structures.
The company agreed to plead
guilty to a federal charge that it
was reckless, in violation of the
federal Natural Gas Pipeline
Safety Act. The $53 million fine

HOLY DAY: Worshipers pray after receiving cross of ashes on their foreheads at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York as Lent begins.

BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS

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IRVINE, Calif.—Tax cheats,

beware: The machines are

watching.

Governments are increas-

ingly relying on machine

learning and data analytics to

analyze troves of data as they

seek to detect tax evasion, re-

spond to taxpayers’ questions

and make themselves more ef-

ficient.

In Brazil, the customs

agency’s system for detecting

anomalies now prompts more

than 30% of inspections. Can-

ada next month will launch

Charlie the Chatbot, an auto-

mated system that will respond

to inquiries about tax filing.

The Internal Revenue Ser-

vice is designing machine-built

graphs to plot the relation-

ships among participants in

business deals, giving auditors

a new tool to analyze transac-

tions and detect tax avoidance.

The agency is using artificial

intelligence to study notes

that agency employees take

when fielding questions from

taxpayers and testing which

combinations of formal no-

tices and contacts are most

likely to get a taxpayer who

owes money to send a check.

The IRS scours data from

inside and outside the agency

for its compliance initiatives,

such as a recent effort to

identify thousands of high-in-

come individuals who didn’t

file returns. The government

is now sending tax collectors

to knock on their doors.

“How do you think we

found these people?” said IRS

Commissioner Charles Rettig

at a conference on artificial in-

telligence and taxes this week

at the University of California,

Irvine law school. “It wasn’t

on filed returns. These are

non-filers. There is a heat map

that says where there are con-

centrations of these people.

We have sufficient data on

these people.”

The IRS criminal investiga-

tions unit uses Palantir Tech-

nologies, the data-mining firm,

to identify potential fraud

cases for further inquiry.

“If I get a first name and a

cellphone number, you’d be

shocked how much informa-

tion Palantir can provide,” Mr.

Rettig said.

Some of the IRS’s most so-

phisticated efforts are still in

their early stages, and the

budget-starved tax agency has

long struggled to update some

of its decades-old technology.

It is too soon to tell how much

impact these initiatives will

have and how they will com-

pete against companies and

accounting firms employing

similar technology in the con-

stant cat-and-mouse game be-

tween taxpayers and enforce-

ment officials.

U.S. states are already using

artificial intelligence to target

resources and increasing the

return per hour they get from

each auditor, said Debbie Pi-

anko of the data firm SAS In-

stitute Inc., which contracts

with governments.

Real risks exist if algo-

rithms for audit selection inad-

vertently discriminate against

taxpayers by race or location.

And relying on technology can

make an already impersonal

agency even more so, perhaps

confusing taxpayers who may

struggle to understand why

the government is coming af-

ter them and want to deal di-

rectly with people at the IRS.

Meanwhile, tax preparers

and accounting firms are turn-

ing to the same tools to keep

tax bills as small as possible.

The big four accounting firms

all have specialists trying to use

artificial intelligence to guide

the advice they give clients.

Machine intelligence can

make it easier for companies to

find the optimal tax strategies.

But tax law is often full of gray

areas, legal interpretations and

changing rules. That means the

human role in tax administra-

tion and tax planning may

change, but it won’t vanish.

BYRICHARDRUBIN

Technology

Helps IRS

Zero In on

Tax Cheats

One effort identified

thousands of wealthy

individuals who

didn’t file returns.

content they don’t like.

Though not unexpected, the

unanimous decision by the Ninth

U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in

San Francisco marks the most

emphatic rejection of the argu-

ment advanced in some conser-

vative circles that YouTube,

Twitter, Facebook and other gi-

ant tech platforms are bound by

the First Amendment.

The case concerned a You-

Tube channel operated by Prager

University, a nonprofit founded

by talk-radio host Dennis Prager

that produces short explainer

videos promoting conservative

ideas. In 2017, PragerU sued

YouTube and its parent,Alpha-

betInc.’s Google, after YouTube

flagged dozens of its videos as

“inappropriate,” stripping the

clips of advertising and making

them less accessible to students,

library users and children.

PragerU contended there was

nothing offensive about the re-

stricted clips and that it was a

victim of viewpoint discrimina-

tion in violation of the First

Amendment.

Google argued that allowing

PragerU to pursue a constitu-

tional claim would have “disas-

trous consequences” for the

First Amendment and online dis-

course.

—Jacob Gershman

LOUISIANA

Governor Urges Judge

To Resign After Slurs

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Ed-

wards called on a judge to step

down after she admitted to us-

ing racial slurs in angry text

messages. The Democratic gov-

ernor said the “state deserves

better.”

Gov. Edwards said Wednes-

day that District Judge Jessie

LeBlanc “has compromised her

ability to preside as a judge, and

she has damaged the judiciary.

She should resign.”

Ms. LeBlanc, who is white,

now admits sending the text

messages after denying them

for months. She acknowledged

in an interview Sunday on

WAFB-TV that she used the

slur to describe a black sheriff’s

deputy and a black law clerk in

text messages she sent to As-

sumption Parish Chief Deputy

Bruce Prejean as their extramar-

ital affair ended.

“I profusely apologize for

that. I should have never said

it,” she said. She said she has

no plans to resign and instead

is gearing up to seek re-election

when her current term in Louisi-

ana’s 23rd Judicial District ex-

pires in December.

—Associated Press

In the Senate, the repeal

bill won support from 15 Dem-

ocrats and four Republicans,

while two Democrats and 11

Republicans opposed the mea-

sure. Previous efforts to end

the death penalty in Colorado

failed to pick up enough Re-

publican support.

Since the 1970s, Colorado

has put to death one inmate—

the lethal injection in 1997 of

a man convicted of kidnap-

ping, raping and murdering a

woman.

The bill would repeal the

death penalty in Colorado for

offenses charged on or after

July 1. It doesn’t apply to Col-

orado’s three current death-

row inmates, including con-

victed killer Nathan Dunlap,

who shot to death four people

at a Chuck E. Cheese restau-

rant in Aurora in 1993. The

other two inmates were sen-

tenced to death for the mur-

der of a couple who were

prosecution witnesses in a

murder case.

Half of U.S. states have now

either abolished the death

penalty or halted executions,

according to the Death Pen-

alty Information Center, a re-

search group critical of capital

punishment. Colorado is

among 10 states that have

abolished capital punishment

since 2004.

The number of executions

has also sharply declined

since the 1990s. In 2019, seven

states put to death 22 prison-

ers, down from a modern-era

peak of 98 executions in 1999.

Colorado is poised to be-

come the latest state to abol-

ish capital punishment after

the state’s Democratic-con-

trolled Legislature approved a

repeal of the state’s death

penalty on Wednesday.

After rounds of long, emo-

tional debate, the Colorado

House of Representatives

voted 38-27 in favor of repeal

almost entirely along partisan

lines, sending the legislation

to the desk of Democratic Gov.

Jared Polis, who is expected to

sign it.

Democrats in the House

voted in favor of the bill by a

margin of 38 to 3, while all 24

Republicans in the chamber

voted no.

BYJACOBGERSHMAN

Colorado Legislature Votes

To Abolish the Death Penalty