The Department of Justice on Tuesday said Consolidated Nuclear Security paid $18.4 million to settle allegations of timecard fraud at the Pantex Plant that date back to the company’s takeover of the facility in 2014.
“[B]etween July 1, 2014, and June 30, 2020, [Consolidated Nuclear Security] knowingly submitted false claims to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for time not worked at NNSA’s Pantex Site near Amarillo, Texas,” the Department of Justice wrote in a press release.
CNS, in an unsolicited statement emailed to media Tuesday evening, said it “agreed to repay the government” for the overcharging, which the company discovered “as it implemented process efficiencies and improved payroll systems.” CNS “promptly disclosed the issue to the Government” in 2019, the company said.
According to court documents in a federal lawsuit filed in 2022 by a former CNS employee, the company fired at least 43 people, including 39 production technicians and three production section managers, in connection with timecard irregularities CNS said it discovered in late 2018.
The former employee, Stephen “Cobey” Monden, was one of the three production section managers fired after CNS’ discovery of timecard irregularities at Pantex.
Monden presented himself as a whistleblower in his lawsuit, but the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas disagreed and in 2023 threw out his case. He subsequently lost an appeal in the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled against him in early March, court papers show.
According to Monden’s lawsuit, the Department of Energy’s Inspector General interviewed at least 120 people at Pantex after CNS self-reported the timekeeping irregularities at the main U.S. nuclear weapons service center.
Monden said that he and some of these people “identified to the [Inspector General] members of CNS’s management who … instructed employees to enter time in a manner contrary to government requirements.”
Monden said CNS subsequently conducted its own interviews with some employees who spoke to the Inspector General. According to Monden, “CNS interviewers told one employee to tell them ‘everything I had told Mr. Gomez (an IG agent) during my interview with him.’”
CNS, in its answer to Monden’s complaint, admitted that it asked employees what they had told the Inspector General, and that it told employees they had a “duty to cooperate in disciplinary investigations,” but denied that company management fostered a culture of timecard fraud. CNS also said that “union representatives attended interviews” with employees.
The trial court that threw out Monden’s suit ruled that while CNS’s head of human resources, who recommended Monden’s firing, knew that Monden spoke to the Department of Energy’s Inspector General, human resources did not know what Monden had told the Inspector General and did not recommend his termination because he had talked to inspectors.
Monden also admitted committing and aiding with timecard fraud, papers filed in the district court show.
Monden is now an operations manager at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, according to his LinkedIn profile, which says he was hired at the lab in June 2023.
CNS, a Bechtel National-led team that also includes Leidos, Northrop Grumman and others, also said that it is “[u]ndertaking extensive measures to guard against the possible reoccurrence of similar misconduct.”
