FERC Chairman Pat Wood confirmed last week that he is considering plans to splinter the Commission’s Enforcement Office off from the Office of General Counsel (OGC) in order to make enforcement a more aggressive, visible part of the federal agency.

“I am considering that…I think it’s important to have a robust enforcement effort at the Commission,” Wood told reporters during a press briefing that followed last Tuesday’s Commission meeting. “As you’ll remember from our strategic plan that we adopted at my first meeting, the third objective was protecting customers and markets through aggressive oversight and enforcement of the Commission’s rules.”

He indicated that he will probably announce the realignment of the Enforcement Office in January, at which time the 120-day moratorium will have expired on Wood’s ability to make personnel changes at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The freeze is placed on all new chairmen.

This could mean that Wood plans to bring in an outsider to run the new office, which would likely be a melding of the Enforcement Office within the Office of Markets, Tariffs and Rates.

The Enforcement Office already has assumed a more prominent role at the Commission in past months, in light of the national attention surrounding the market-power and affiliate-abuse allegations against El Paso Natural Gas and El Paso Merchant Energy Co.

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