U.S. Agency Ignores Timber Theft Controls, Report Says

The U.S. Forest Service often fails to follow its policies intended to prevent, identify and punish the theft of valuable timber by logging companies in national forests in Northern California and elsewhere across the country, the Agriculture Department’s inspector general has found.

“Without the proper controls in place to prevent and to detect timber theft, the Forest Service reduces the likelihood of identifying theft when it occurs and of prosecuting suspected individuals or businesses involved in the activity,” the government auditor said after a review of a cross-section of timber sales for the last two fiscal years.

The 34-page report concluded that Forest Service personnel frequently did not maintain complete inventory records of tracer paint used to designate trees to be cut or conduct sufficient tests to verify the paint’s authenticity. It also said that employees failed to perform the required number of spot checks of trucks hauling logs out of the national forests and did not always perform required internal reviews to determine the adequacy of timber theft prevention controls or to ensure that necessary corrective action had been taken.

Even when the agency’s timber sale administrators determined that unauthorized trees had been logged, they often did not inform law enforcement personnel because they did not consider the action “serious enough” to do so--despite agency directives requiring such notification, the report said.

According to the audit, inspection reports revealed that loggers had cut undesignated timber in 26 of the 61 sales that they reviewed, but that sale administrators informed the agency’s law enforcement personnel of only six of those cases. The loggers paid for the extra timber in each case but generally were allowed to do so through a contract adjustment, rather than face criminal inquiries.

“Continued tolerance of this practice . . . not only undermines the integrity of sale markings and boundaries but could also compromise future investigations of timber theft cases,” the audit warned.

The findings by the inspector general of the Agriculture Department, which oversees the Forest Service, are the latest criticism of the agency’s efforts to combat timber theft by companies that log on public lands. Advocacy groups representing six members of a special timber theft task force that was disbanded by Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas last year have contended that the agency has not made timber theft a priority and, in one case, obstructed a major inquiry.

In response to the inspector general’s conclusions, the Forest Service vowed to revise its timber sale administration handbook by Sept. 30 to incorporate the audit’s recommendations.

In addition, Manuel Martinez, the Forest Service’s head of law enforcement, said Monday that the agency will now require timber sale administrators to inform law enforcement of any possible timber theft on the day it is discovered.

He said the agency needs more money to hire an additional 200 or so officers to check loads of logs leaving the forests. He said his 460 uniformed officers are each responsible for an average of 499 square miles. The Forest Service also deploys about 160 investigators.

The audit looked at three geographic regions--the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the South--that accounted for three-quarters of the $914 million in timber sales receipts for 1993 and 69% of the $783 million total for 1994.

The survey focused on five national forests: the Lassen and Tahoe in Northern California; the Umpqua in Oregon, the Chattahoochee-Oconee in Georgia and the Kisatchie in Louisiana.

A spokesman for purchasers of Forest Service timber said that the theft issue is generally overblown, but that the industry “very adamantly opposes any timber theft.”