Apparently, changing your name can make all the difference in the world.
Just ask Archibald Leach or Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPiere. Then there’s Reginald Dwight, Ralph Lipshitz and of course Calvin Broadus.
Leach became the embodiment of suave when he changed his moniker to Cary Grant. Before embarking on her legendary solo career, LaPiere teamed up with a diminutive crooner named Sonny Bono.
Dwight eventually serenaded royalty before he was knighted Sir Elton; Lipshitz’s polo player morphed into a symbol of American chic, and no one would have paid much attention if the rapper known as Snoop Dogg had kept his given name.
Maybe this explains why, after a scathing report by a federal inspector general, the U.S. agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service (MMS) has changed its name to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. The former MMS is the agency that was charged with enforcing safety among Gulf of Mexico offshore oil drillers including BP’s now infamous Deep Water Horizon.
A Little Too Tight, Boys
The federal probe which centered on the Lake Charles, LA, offices of the MMS unearthed a cozy relationship among regulators and the regulated. The Inspector General found that MMS regulators accepted lavish lunches, football tickets, were taken on hunting trips and even had sex with oil company employees. The report also documented that at least one frontline employee in the agency’s Lake Charles office was simultaneously negotiating employment with an energy company while still inspecting oil platforms in the Gulf.
Investigators additionally determined that the agency operated with unavoidable conflicts of interest. Along with overseeing platform safety, the MMS was responsible for lease sales of offshore tracts as well as collecting royalties for oil and gas produced in the Gulf. On the one hand, the agency was charged with maximizing revenue while at the same time being asked to keep a watchful eye on the operations of energy producers.
The structure of the MMS is reminiscent of the now- defunct Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). During the post-war years, following the first use of nuclear weapons, the agency was not only tasked with regulating the safe and peaceful uses of the atom but also with promoting widespread use of the technology. Following a critical report in 1973 and the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, regulation was severed from promotion. The result was the formation of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency and ERDA (Energy Research and Development Administration), which later became the U.S. Dept. of Energy.
Look What Did Not Change
Despite the name change and bureaucratic reorganization, the culture of the recast atomic energy agency remained the same. Just five years later, the accident and near meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island proved the point. In thousands of pages of reports following the near disaster, investigators found that the buddy-buddy relationship between federal regulators and their charges in the nuclear industry had remained unchanged from the old days when they shared the same stationery.
In an attempt to alter the public perception of lax bank regulators after the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the government changed the name of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS). OTS was responsible for regulating financial giants like failed and bailed insurer AIG. Under the rubric of the proposed financial regulatory reform scheme now pending before Congress, the OTS would be dissolved and folded in with a larger federal oversight agency.
History has demonstrated repeatedly that changing an agency’s name or even splitting it from its conflicting component parts is not enough. It is the basic operating culture of the regulator that must be changed. In the case of the MMS or the OTS, if this means firing every bureaucrat from the top dog to lowliest clerk, that is what must be done.
If you’re only going to change the name on the door without changing the way an agency does business, you might as well do nothing at all.
John Cohn is a senior partner in the Globe West Financial Group based in West Los Angeles. He may be contacted at www.globewestfinancial.com
