When oil and gas companies confront complex royalty or severance-tax audits, demands, enforcement actions, or transactional questions, they turn to Rosario.
Rosario advises operators and lessees on critical royalty and severance tax reporting, payment, and compliance issues, ranging from small, specialized operators to multi-national companies. She regularly represents payors operating on federal and tribal lands, and those operating under federal leases in the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico.
Clients rely on Rosario for her insights into regulatory rulemaking and her proactive guidance on compliance with new rules and policies. Over the course of her career, Rosario’s work has included saving producers an estimated $25 billion in costs.
Rosario guides clients through self-audits and in responding to governmental audits, such as data mining requests, compliance reviews, enforcement inquiries, and other investigations conducted by the Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR), the Department of Justice, the Office of Inspector General, or State Departments of Audit.
She also assists clients identify and pursue refunds and challenge adverse assessments, such as orders to pay, orders to perform restructured accounting, civil penalty notices, denials of cost allocation and valuation proposals, and tribal delinquency notices.
Rosario brings a rare combination of computational acumen and creative thinking necessary to articulate comprehensive and novel legal arguments persuasive to regulators, tribes, and courts. Rosario regularly handles appeals before the ONRR Director, the Interior Board of Land Appeals, and federal district and appellate courts. She has also negotiated and resolved complex disputes with tribal authorities, including the Navajo Nation and Kiowa Tribe.
Clients appreciate Rosario’s painstaking attention to detail as well as her ability to recognize opportunities for deductions and other cost valuation methodologies that may reduce financial obligations.
Before joining Holland & Hart, Rosario was a partner at Ryan Law Firm, where she led the firm’s oil and gas royalty practice. She also practiced as an associate at Baker & Hostetler and Norton Rose Fulbright.