CID races to catch up with greedy contractors - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

CID races to catch up with greedy contractors

One contractor was forced to pay more than $9 million in fines after being convicted of improperly testing and manufacturing critical filters for M1 Abrams tanks.

Another contractor, who lied about air-shipping equipment to military installations when in fact it was trucking it and pocketing the savings, has paid the government $20 million in fines and penalties.

These and more than 500 other major fraud cases like them, involving millions of dollars at home and overseas, have kept a team of Army Criminal Investigation Command special agents so busy that their commanders are asking for more money for more agents to combat a seemingly rampant problem.

CID has conducted 215 fraud investigations involving Iraq, Afghanistan or Kuwait, said Dan Quinn, a retired colonel who serves as the chief of staff for CID. Of those cases, 117 are still open. In addition, the fraud unit is working on more than 400 cases in the U.S.

“Especially with the war, if people are greedy enough that they’re going to take hundreds of thousands of dollars and even millions of dollars while we have soldiers out there fighting every day … it’s important that we pay attention to it and punish them for it,” said Scott Moreland, acting special agent in charge of the expeditionary fraud field office in Alexandria, Va.

The work done by CID’s Major Procurement Fraud Unit is critical, Quinn said.

“It’s not real sexy, but my goodness, it sure is important to our soldiers and our civilians and to our nation,” he said. “It’s extremely important because of the second- and third-degree effects of what they do.

“What they’re looking at is stuff that saves lives every day, whether it’s an allegation that the parts being put in a helicopter are bad, allegations that protective vests may not be up to standard,” Quinn said. “A lot of what they do equates to soldier safety, Army readiness, and the health and welfare of our soldiers and their families.”

About 150 agents are assigned to the Major Procurement Fraud Unit, and in 2007, CID asked for more agents and the money to fill those positions as quickly as possible.

CID has since hired 25 more agents and 13 support personnel, paying for them using supplemental, temporary funding, Quinn said. The Army has since approved slots for 25 more agents, and has told CID that permanent funding for these new agents will come through in fiscal 2010, he said.

“When we started uncovering the amount of fraud in theater, which was a surprise for us, quite honestly, we went to the Army and asked for more manpower,” he said.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are key reasons for the spike in major fraud cases, Quinn said.

“When you look at the amount of money the government is spending in the contracting arena, it only makes sense that you’re going to have to increase the number of agents who look at the fraud … and the number of personnel who handle those actions,” he said. “If there’s no fear of being caught, people are going to commit more crime.”

In the last 10 years, CID special agents have helped recover more than $1 billion for the government, Quinn said. Of that total, $206 million was returned to the Army, he said.

The Army also continues to build Contracting Command, established in March 2008 in response to recommendations from the Gansler Commission, a task force chartered by the Army in 2007 to assess contracting operations.

Contracting Command, which has its headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Va., and 115 locations around the world, is responsible for about 80 percent of Army contracting, said Jeffrey Parsons, executive director of the command.

In fiscal 2008, the command executed about $104 billion in contracts, Parsons said. In comparison, similar Army contracts six years ago were worth $22 billion, he said.

“There’s such a reliance on contractors to help us with our mission that we’ve got to do this correctly,” Parsons said.

There are 854 Army and 4,928 civilian slots in Contracting Command, Parsons said, adding that only about 30 percent of the military slots have been filled. Parsons said he doesn’t expect to fill the military positions until about 2013.

About 92 percent of the civilian positions are filled, but he also is looking to hire 500 interns, new employees he and his staff can train and mentor.

“We’re having a real difficult time on the civilian side getting people with a lot of experience,” he said. “About a third of my civilian work force has less than five years of contracting experience.”

Experienced and skilled employees are critical, Parsons said.

“The real important part is in this line of business — it’s $104 billion a year, so you’re talking a lot of money,” he said. “You need properly trained and experienced people … to make sure we’re doing it right.”

Most of the agents in CID’s fraud unit have served in the military, but the unit is made up of civilians because the crime is so complicated that it often takes years to wrap up a case and civilians have more longevity in one location than soldiers, Quinn said.

CID special agents specializing in fraud didn’t start deploying to the war zones until 2005, Quinn said.

“We started getting some rumblings from our CID agents over there that there was some fraud going on,” he said. “We sent our fraud guys over there and they came back and said, ‘Hey, we think we’ve got a problem.’ ”

Early on, the cash-only environment, big and expensive contracts and a lack of safeguards fed the greed that seemed to be permeating the contracts moving through Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan, said James Podolak, director of the Major Procurement Fraud Unit.

“Many of the contracting officers and specialists had returned over and over,” he said. “They asked for second and third tours. Those same folks, in most cases, were on the take. Within a couple of months of deploying our civilian agents to Iraq and Kuwait, within just a few short months, we were already turning cases.”

CID has since established antifraud offices in theater, in addition to the 20-some antifraud offices already in the U.S., South Korea and Germany, but the problem persists, Quinn said.

“Are we still seeing the same problems over in theater? Have we investigated? Is all the crime back in the box? No,” he said. “We’re still investigating crimes, many going back to the 2005, 2006 time frame.”

Cases from the war zone put a strain on the agents, who also had to keep up with fraud cases back home, Podolak said.

“We had to let some things go,” he said. “There weren’t enough agents. We desperately needed people to continue to deploy and to continue to do our traditional mission back here.”

Moving forward, CID plans to grow the fraud unit and also look at investigations involving the moves and construction that will take place under the base realignment and closure process, Quinn said.

“We still have some bad contractors out there,” Podolak said. “For those folks, the message will be, ‘You may be getting away with fraud right now, but you won’t be getting away with it for long.’ ”

Where the jobs are

• For more information on how to become a special agent with Criminal Investigation Command, visit www.cid.army.mil/join_CID.html.

• To learn more about how to become a part of Army Contracting Command, visit www.amc.army.mil/acc.