Government Contract Investigations

Jeremy Scahill in The Nation in May 2009 mentioned the following:

• Master electricians testified before Congress that KBR electrical work was faulty.
• Senator Frank Lautenberg mentioned that 18 U.S. soldiers have died due to KBR’s work.
• The U.S. Department of Defense paid KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary, $80 million in bonuses for electrical wiring in Iraq.
• The bonuses were paid after the deaths of U.S. soldiers.

To read the entire article, click on KBR Got Bonuses for Work that Killed Soldiers.

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Jeremy Scahill in The Nation in October 2009 mentioned the following:

• The top 100 government contractors earned almost $300 billion from federal contracts in 2007
• Since 1995, these same top 100 contractors “have been involved with 676 cases of ‘misconduct’ and paid $26 billion in fines to settle cases stemming from fraud, waste or abuse”
• Pfizer in September paid $2.3 billion to settle criminal and civil cases, including Medicaid fraud
• Pfizer, which earned more than $40 billion in profits in 2008, won $73 million in federal contracts in 2007
• “Over the past fifteen years, ACORN” has received $53 million in federal funds, “much of it for low-income housing.”
• “In mid-September all but seventy-five House Democrats and seven senators voted with their Republican colleagues to bar the group [Acorn] from receiving federal funds”
• Neither Pfizer nor the other large contractors are targets of significant Congressional action.

To read the entire article, click on The ACORN Standard.

The list of the top contractors referred to in the article is from Project on Government Oversight. For example, the top 5 government contractors in 2007 were Lockheed Martin, Boeing Company, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Raytheon Company. $104 billion in federal contracts in 2007 and $3.3 billion in misconduct fees since 1995. To view the entire list, click on Federal Contractor Misconduct Database.