Today, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Office of Enforcement (OE) issued its 2017 Report on Enforcement. The report provides a review of OE’s activities during fiscal year 2017, which begins October 1 and ends September 30 annually, revealing likely areas of focus for FERC enforcement in the coming year.
The report indicates that even though FERC lacked a quorum for much of 2017, OE continued to focus on the same areas of market and operational risk that have traditionally captured its attention, which include (i) fraud and market manipulation; (ii) anticompetitive conduct; (iii) conduct that threatens transparency in regulated markets; and (iv) serious violations of mandatory reliability standards. OE does not anticipate that its priorities will change for fiscal year 2018. FERC also addresses its continued litigation of contested cases in federal courts. Additionally, similar to fiscal year 2016, the report indicates that the vast majority of alleged violations that come to OE’s attention are addressed informally through corrective actions voluntarily implemented by the subject of the investigation, without the need for a formal settlement. But this year, OE provides detailed examples of surveillance inquiries initiated by its Division of Analytics and Surveillance that are closed without referral to the US Department of Justice. Details on the topics in the 2017 Enforcement Report will be further described in a future LawFlash that will be posted as part of Morgan Lewis’s Power & Pipes energy law web postings. These issues will also be discussed in further detail during an upcoming webinar hosted by Morgan Lewis linked below.