Paper published in 2012 from business management faculty in two Canadian Universities, which just came to our attention, but even though from 2012, it is so important today. The DEP is funded by PA taxpayers to protect the environment and the people of PA from harm, and the whole agency is failing. They cannot “build and maintain an accurate database of drilling activity”. This is risking residents’ health, damaging the environment and costing PA government millions in lost fees.

Download “An Analysis of Unconventional Gas Well Reporting under Pennsylvania’s Act 13 of 2012” as a pdf

An Analysis of Unconventional Gas Well Reporting under Pennsylvania’s Act 13 of 2012
Abstract:
In response to growing concerns about the impact of shale gas development, Pennsylvania’s Act 13 of 2012 established an unconventional gas well fee and required the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to report on the number of such wells. In this article, we analyze the extent to which the DEP complied with its reporting requirements under Act 13. Using publicly available data, we find that the DEP likely omitted between 15,300 and 25,100 unconventional gas wells from its Act 13 report. Left uncorrected, we estimate that Pennsylvania’s state, county, and municipal governments could forfeit fees of $205–$303 million in 2012 and up to $0.75–$1.85 billion cumulatively over the expected life of these wells. Rather than an isolated incident, evidence suggests that information management is a systemic and recurring problem within the DEP and its predecessor agencies. We propose the implementation of a relational database and geographic information system as a way for the DEP to fulfill its Act 13 obligations.

FROM the paper’s CONCLUSIONS – explains WHY PA DEP is the way it is:
Although our study did not attempt to identify the mechanisms that may be responsible for the DEP’s inability to build and maintain an accurate database of drilling activity, prior organizational research suggests several plausible explanations. Most sinister is the possibility of regulatory capture (Levine and Forrence, 1990), wherein governmental agencies succumb to narrow special interests, straying from the goal of serving their intended public constituencies. Another possibility is that the DEP exists in a state of permanent failure (Meyer and Zucker, 1989), wherein organizational members focus their attention and efforts primarily on organizational survival rather than organizational performance. A third possibility is that the DEP recognizes the need for improved organizational performance, yet is unable to implement a robust program of organizational learning (Argote, 1999; Argyris and Schön, 1978) that will enable it to fundamentally address the root causes underlying its data management problems. The extent to which these mechanisms may be to blame is beyond the scope of our article, but may be fruitful possibilities for the DEP and future research to consider.