NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The Justice Department says more than $64 million will be paid to about 7,300 people and businesses whose claims with BP's $20 billion compensation fund were shortchanged or wrongfully denied after the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The department announced Thursday that an independent audit of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility found "significant errors" in its processing of claims.
The auditor also found claimants who were erroneously overpaid. The department says the GCCF isn't trying to to recover those overpayments.
The GCCF, led by Kenneth Feinberg, paid out more than $6 billion to more than 220,000 claimants over nearly two years after the blowout of BP's Macondo well spawned the nation's worst offshore oil spill.
A court-supervised administrator has taken over the claims process from the GCCF.
