Another BP Attempt to Avoid Oil Spill Payments Fails

A third-party auditing firm verified that almost all of the claims filed against BP regarding the 2010 oil spill have been correctly processed, reported The Times-Picayune. This audit came at BP’s request after disputing the results of a previous audit that had similar findings.

Auditors from the Chicago-based auditing firm McGladrey LLP verified that 99.5 percent of oil spill claims have been correctly processed. The results of the audit were released yesterday by the BP claims administrator, Patrick Juneau, after a New Orleans federal judge forced Juneau to provide those results at BP’s request.

According to the audit, the claims program is “well-designed and appropriate.” It was also the second audit requested by BP after the company disputed the results of an initial audit conducted by Juneau and completed by auditing firm Clifton Larson Allen last year. That first audit carried the same results as the one conducted by McGladrey.

The audit consisted of 1,852 claims out of the total 53,512 submitted to the court supervised settlement program in 2012. Of those reviewed claims, only 122 had calculation errors, the error rate was about 0.3 percent, and larger groups of claims increased slightly to 0.5 percent. In all, there were only $17.5 million in errors for over $3.7 billion in total awards.

Perhaps most refreshing to know is that a court-ordered investigation into the claim found that scattered, isolated cases of claims fraud didn’t affect the entire claims process.

The British oil company has tried, on several occasions, to get out of paying claims that it has considered as unfair. It ordered two different audits because the company felt that either people were scamming or Juneau was incompetent. The audits proved otherwise, and BP needs to just pay what it owes.

“It is ironic that BP talks about people ‘getting something for nothing’ when that’s exactly what BP is trying to do,” commented Brian Barr, an attorney with Levin, Papantonio and a member of the Plaintiff’s Steering Committee for the BP Gulf Coast Oil Spill litigation.