Wise Services paid about $300,000 to the federal government to settle allegations that the company billed the government for non-existent construction materials at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., the Justice Department said Monday.
The Dayton, Ohio-based company was a subcontractor to CB&I MOX Services, which was building the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site until the Department of Energy officially canceled the project in 2018. According to Justice’s settlement agreement, the subcontractor between 2008 and 2015 wrote phony invoices and paid kickbacks to the prime.
Wise’s $302,500 settlement “was negotiated based on Wise’s lack of ability to pay,” the Justice Department wrote in a press release. The company will pay the federal government in installments over five years, according to the settlement agreement. CB&I Mox Services itself was slapped with a $10-million fraud fine in March.
David Abney was the president of Wise Services, according to company records on the federal government’s procurement website, sam.gov. The company was registered as a minority owned business and a black American owned business, according to federal records. Wise Services was registered to do business out of a small office in Dayton.
The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility was meant to turn surplus weapon-usable plutonium into fuel for civilian nuclear-power reactors. The plan proved infeasible when no customers materialized and the DOE pivoted to morphing the partially built plant into a factory for plutonium pits: the fissile cores of nuclear weapons.
The new Savannah River Plutonium Pit Processing Facility is supposed to open in the mid-2030s.
