http://www.oha.doe.gov/cases/refunds/2002/September/rk27201885.htm
U. S. Department of Energy
Office of Hearings and Appeals (OHA)
Case No. RK272-01885
September 5, 2002
DECISION AND ORDER
OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
Supplemental Order
Names of Cases: Watchtower Bible & Tract Society
Dates of Cases: July 14, 1995
Case Numbers: RK272-01885
Pursuant to the long-standing policy of the Department of Energy (DOE), thousands of purchasers of petroleum products have applied for, and been granted, refunds from crude oil overcharge funds under the jurisdiction of the DOEs Office of Hearings and Appeals (OHA). See Statement of Modified Restitutionary Policy To Be Implemented In Crude Oil Cases, 51 Fed. Reg. 27899 (August 4, 1986). The standards for considering Applications for Refund from these crude oil funds are set forth at 10 C.F.R. Part 205, Subpart V.
The OHA has approved more than 87,000 requests for refund from the pool of crude oil overcharge funds. In Subpart V crude oil refund cases, a claimant is generally eligible for a refund equal to the number of gallons of eligible refined petroleum products it purchased during the period from August 19, 1973 through January 27, 1981, multiplied by a per gallon amount. That per gallon refund amount is derived by dividing the total refund monies available by the total U.S. consumption of petroleum products during the crude oil price control period. Refunds had been calculated by multiplying the number of gallons of eligible refined petroleum products purchased by the applicant by $0.0008 (the volumetric factor). That volumetric factor had been in use since April 1989, when it replaced an earlier volumetric factor of $0.0002 per gallon. Any applicant who received a refund at the lower volumetric factor also received a supplemental refund based on an additional $0.0006 per gallon. See Crude Oil Supplemental Refund Distribution, 18 DOE 85,878 (1989).
Additional crude oil overcharge funds have become available for disbursement and we can now issue additional refund checks to applicants. Sufficient funds are available to pay applicants at a new, aggregate rate of $0.0016 per gallon.(1) Thus, the amount of the supplemental refund will be equal to the refund already received. Refunds are rounded to the nearest dollar.
In order to receive a supplemental refund check, applicants are being required to verify (directly or through their representatives) that their name and address in our records are correct, to correct any information that is not accurate, and to indicate whether there has been any change in circumstances affecting the payment of the refund. We intend to issue a series of Decision and Orders approving supplemental refunds as we receive completed verification forms from all applicants or certifications from their representatives.
This Decision and Order contains the name and address of a claimant receiving one of these supplemental refund checks. In this case, we were informed that there had been a change of circumstances since the previous refund was disbursed. Accordingly, we set up a new case file (designated RK272-)(2) and investigated whether the party that submitted the verification form (or on whose behalf the form was submitted) was the proper party to receive the supplemental refund. On the basis of that investigation, we have determined that the party listed below is the proper recipient of the supplemental refund. The dollar amount of the supplemental refund being approved in this Order for the claimant is $7,787.
It Is Therefore Ordered That:
(1) The Director of Special Accounts and Payroll, Office of Departmental Accounting and Financial Systems Development, Office of the Controller of the Department of Energy shall take appropriate action to disburse a supplemental refund of $7,787 to the claimant at the following address:
Watchtower Bible & Tract Society
c/o James Kimball
25 Columbia Heights
Brooklyn, NY 11201-2483
(2) The funds shall be disbursed from the escrow fund denominated Crude Tracking-Claimants IV, Account No. 999DOE010Z, maintained at the Department of Treasury.
(3) To facilitate the payment of any future refunds, an applicant shall notify the Office of Hearings and Appeals in the event that there is a change of address, or if an address correction is necessary. Such notification shall be sent to:
Office of Hearings and Appeals
HG-1/LEnfant Plaza Building
U.S. Department of Energy
1000 Independence Ave., S.W.
Washington, DC 20585-1615
(4) Any conditions imposed that applied to an applicants receipt of the initial crude oil refund shall also apply to that applicants receipt of this supplemental refund.
(5) This is a final Order of the Department of Energy.
George B. Breznay
Director
Office of Hearings and Appeals
Now think of it for a second: for a refund of $7,787 at a rate of $0.0006 per gallon, the WT must have traded 12,978,333 gallons (thats almost thirteen million gallons of crude oil!) The dates of case originaly filed is July 14, 1995, closed on September 5, 2002 but it is unclear to me the time range in which the WT purchased this large volume of crude oil - and its use.
Full details
can be downloaded from OHA Crude Oil Refunds Information--Database Crude Oil Refund Data Base. "This file contains approximately 110,000 records with selected data from all applications received by OHA in the DOE crude oil refund proceeding. The file is in Zip compressed format and is approximately 5.1Mb in size. Customers with 28,800 baud modems will require approximately 1 hour to transfer the file to your computer. After you have decompressed it with a decompression utility, the file will require an additional 24Mb of disk space.":http://www.oha.doe.gov/data.htm
Edited by - Gerard on 10 February 2003 1:29:9