Stimulating a Heightened Awareness of Contractor Misconduct

A word of advice to contracting officials overseeing the disbursement of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds: beware the "scofflaw companies."

That's the term used by ProPublica to describe the contractors receiving money under the economic stimulus package that have paid big fines for violating environmental, workplace safety, discrimination and other regulations. So far, almost $4 billion in Recovery Act contracts has been awarded, much of it going to companies with long histories of doing business with the government and, as often it turns out, long histories of misconduct.

Two of the companies profiled in the ProPublica article might be familiar to POGO readers or anyone who has seen our Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD): CACI International and Chugach Alaska Corporation. CACI, which was awarded $1.5 million in stimulus contracts to provide contracting specialists to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, only has one misconduct instance in the FCMD, but has lately been embroiled in several pending lawsuits involving its interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Similarly, Chugach Alaska Corporation and its subsidiaries, which have won 55 contracts worth $23.5 million to perform various repair and maintenance services at military facilities, have no misconduct instances (although the ProPublica article tipped POGO off to a 2004 racial discrimination lawsuit we didn't know about before, so that will soon change).

Granted, these two companies are not the worst of the worst (at least according to the FCMD), but far more egregious “scofflaw” contractors are now, or will soon be, receiving Recovery Act funds. (Finding a definitive list of these contractors, however, is still a dicey proposition. For instance, according to USAspending.gov, CH2M Hill, UT-Battelle, University of Chicago, and IBM are among the top 100 recipients of Recovery Act contracts. General Electric is not on that list, despite the fact that this $15 million Navy contract I found on FedBizOpps.gov should put them somewhere in the top 10.)

-- Neil Gordon

Comments

[Scott]

Thank you for the link to USAspending.gov.

Small businesses are not receiving their fare share as far as I am concerned.