As the Obama administration promises more scrutiny of BP, new details have emerged of the government’s lax oversight of Gulf of Mexico oil drilling in the years before the spill. The New York Times reports a forthcoming inspector general investigation has found that federal regulators at the Minerals Management Service allowed industry officials to fill out their own inspection reports. The regulators then traced over the industry officials’ writing in pen and submitted the forms as their own. In another case, an MMS official conducted inspections of drilling platforms at the same time as he was negotiating a job with the drilling company involved. The probe also found that officials at the MMS field office in Louisiana repeatedly accepted gifts from at least one oil and gas company.