The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement’s Incident Investigations Program

We reviewed the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) to determine what progress has been made in improving its incident investigations program since the Deepwater Horizon incident in 2010. Overall, we learned that BSEE improved its incident investigations program, but communication challenges were impacting the program.BSEE made progress in improving its incident investigations program. Specifically, BSEE established a National Investigations Program, dedicated staff to incident investigations, developed policies to address incident investigations, and created a basic training program on conducting incident investigations. In addition, BSEE updated and finalized its investigations policy, tiering policy, and handbook.While BSEE made improvements in these areas, we found communication issues that were negatively impacting the incident investigations program.