Amid renewed interest in waste, fraud and abuse in federal government spending, the Justice Department recently announced a $6.5 million settlement with Washington River Protection Solutions — an Energy Department contractor responsible for significant nuclear waste cleanup at the decommissioned Hanford site, near the Columbia River. The settlement resolves a False Claims Act lawsuit originally filed by a whistleblower who alleged that WRPS defrauded the United States by systematically submitting inflated invoices for labor charges at the site — a scheme commonly called “time-card fraud.” And WRPS is no stranger to time-card fraud, having settled a similar FCA lawsuit for $5.275 million in 2017.
Why highlight these relatively small time-card fraud settlements from the far corner of the Pacific Northwest?
For starters, these are two of a growing list of time-card fraud settlements at Hanford. And not all of those settlements were small: CH2M Hill and several company managers paid nearly $20 million in criminal and civil penalties from 2013 to 2015, and AECOM paid $57.75 million in 2020. Of course, time-card fraud is not unique to Hanford, or to nuclear facilities. In 2015 the University of Florida paid $19.875 million for improper labor charges on hundreds of federal grants. Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation paid $31.65 million in 2018 in civil and criminal liability due to inflating employees’ labor charges on a Defense Department contract at a U.S. Air Force base in...
(The Lion) — Political commentator Robby Starbuck is suing Google for defamation after he alleges the company’s search and artificial intelligence services repeatedly made false claims he committed...