CH2M has paid almost $471,000 to the Department of Energy as part of a March 2013 agreement to settle civil and criminal allegations of time card fraud at the Hanford Site in Washington state. DOE may only spend the money on systems at Hanford that would detect or deter time card fraud and abuse. CH2M had agreed as part of the settlement to spend $500,000 on accountability systems at Hanford. It spent just over $29,000 on modifications for the CH2M Plateau Remediation Co. time card system to add automated verification of time worked by employees. The company paid the remainder of the $500,000 to DOE.
The money for time card systems is in addition to an $18.5 million settlement for time card fraud that occurred from 1999 to 2008 when CH2M Hill Hanford Group held the waste storage tank farm contract for the former plutonium production site near Richland. That settlement has been paid. CH2M Plateau Remediation has the current Hanford Central Plateau contract and its employees were not implicated in the case.
The Department of Justice said tank farm workers were offered eight-hour overtime shifts to get them to sign up for the extra work. When work was completed on the overtime shifts, sometimes in just a few hours, workers were free to go home but were paid for a full eight hours, according to the Department of Justice. DOE reimbursed the contractor for worker wages.
CH2M is required to provide a full accounting of the $500,000 to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Eastern Washington to ensure that it came from the company’s own money and was not charged directly or indirectly to DOE. The modifications to the CH2M Plateau Remediation Co. time card system were reviewed and approved by an independent corporate monitor. Under the terms of the settlement, CH2M was required to give the monitor full access to personnel, systems, and locations where CH2M Plateau Remediation Co. was performing work. The monitor was required to be employed for three years and began work in July 2013. CH2M also was required to cooperate in the investigation and prosecution of those the Department of Justice believed had committed time card fraud.
“The investigation of CH2M Hill Hanford Group’s systemic timecard fraud revealed a disturbing culture of fraud that has infected various areas of the Hanford Site,” said Michael Ormsby, U.S. attorney for Eastern Washington, in a statement. Nine hourly workers for CH2M Hill Hanford Group pleaded guilty to charges related to time card fraud and paid fines of up to $165,000 each. Ten managers and supervisors for the contractor also were indicted. Two pleaded guilty, with one paying a fine and the other sentenced to one month of incarceration for a month and three months of home detention. Four of them went to trial and were acquitted by a jury. The remaining four defendants had their criminal charges dropped after agreeing to pay civil penalties.
The Department of Justice is committed to helping implement solutions to deter fraud in the future at Hanford, Ormsby said. “We are pleased that CH2M, through the NPA (Non-Prosecution Agreement) process, has become an ally in these efforts and we hope that other contractors at Hanford will follow its lead without the need for the direct involvement of law enforcement,” he said. CH2M, which faces restrictions on discussing the case under the terms of the settlement agreement it signed in 2013, had no comment.
