No one wants to land a spot on the Government Accountability Office High-Risk List. Fortunately, only one federal agency is slated to get the dubious honor this year and the prize goes to—the Interior Department for abysmal oversight of the oil and gas industry. The Department can thank the Deepwater Horizon oil spill for calling attention to its mismanagement of natural resources.

“It's better late than never, but it shouldn't have taken the worst ecological disaster in history for GAO to place this program onto the high risk list,” Representative Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told the Washington Post.

Three issues landed the Interior Department on the naughty list—dubious revenue collection policies, staff turnover and training problems, and questions about whether these problems can be managed while Interior's oil and gas program undergoes a complex post-spill reorganization. The accompanying report criticized Interior for not implementing GAO's previous recommendations, but acknowledged that establishing the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement will quell some of the issues.

That effort is continuing and “has dramatically increased safety standards and oversight of the oil and gas industry,” Department Spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff told the Post.

The GAO list and report identifying "programs vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement" have been updated at the start of each Congress since 1990. And while Interior's oil and gas program joins 29 other programs already on the list, in this fiscal climate it shouldn't count on escaping Congress' attention by getting lost in the crowd.

“[The report] is especially relevant at a time when our nation's budget deficits are at historic levels and we have to spend every taxpayer dollar as if it were our own,” Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Liberman (I-Conn.), told the Post.