The Department of Energy is seeking to hold contractors accountable for high ethical standards and professional practices, executives at the Office of Environmental Management said publicly this week and last.
Hanford Site in Washington state can use education along with the specter of financial loss in pushing ethical standards for contractors, the site’s federal manager, Brian Vance, said Oct. 7. Vance spoke during an online meeting of the Hanford Advisory Board.
The DOE has mandated ethics programs for major contractors and this effort is “very similar to a safety program” in that it’s designed to “reinforce expectations of ethical behavior,” Vance said.
Bad ethics reviews can endanger “dollars now” and “contracts later,” at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), Vance said.
This week, Norbert Doyle, EM’s deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and project management, said in an online presentation from Washington, D.C. that professional ethics are intertwined in procurement.
“We also want to hold our major contractors accountable,” Doyle said in a presentation to the Tennessee-based Energy Technology and Environmental Business Association on Tuesday.
Companies that fail in this regard can be forced by DOE to forfeit fees as part of the agency’s regular assessment of government contractors, Doyle and Vance said. Negative ethics findings can be entered into DOE’s automated Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System, potentially resulting in black marks on an entity’s permanent record, the officials said.
“All federal contracting officers have access to that system” and see the grades in the performance system, Doyle said.
On the education front, the Department of Energy “issued ethical booklets to all of our employees” at Hanford, Vance said. Contractors have also started having regular “ethics moments,” he added.
Vance responded to a board member’s question on what DOE is doing to push high professional standards in light of last month’s Department of Justice announcement that Waste Treatment Completion Co., an entity composed of Bechtel and what is now Amentum, agreed to pay almost $58 million for alleged overbilling at Hanford.
The case dates to 2016, when four whistleblowers alleged overcharges for idle time by the companies at the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant. The same whistleblowers in May 2017 filed a complaint under seal in U.S. District Court under the False Claims Act.
The DOE has been given extra attention to ethics at Hanford since release of an Office of Inspector General report in November 2018, Vance said. The report looked at various challenges at Hanford, including whether DOE does enough to ensure workers can raise safety or mismanagement concerns without fear of reprisal.
