Marine veteran and her legal team awarded $69 million from contractor that defrauded government
Sarah Feinberg worked for Booz Allen, a defense contractor, after her deployment. Over the course of her employment with them, she noticed that they were overcharging the U.S. government for their services. Doing some detective work on her own, she sought to inform the appropriate officials of her discovery. She assumed that this may have been oversight or lack of knowledge on their part. It turned out that the company was deliberately overcharging the federal government to fund other contracts.
From the Daily Mail:
Sarah Feinberg, 39, moved to join the ranks of military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton as a financial analyst following her time as a Marine.
While working there, Feinberg discovered the company was overcharging the U.S. Government to the tune of $100 million-a-year to cover losses in other areas of its businesses, including consulting contracts with foreign states like Saudi Arabia.
The firm, headquartered in McLean, Virginia, was accused of improperly charging costs to its government contracts and subcontracts that should have been billed to its commercial and international contracts.
The Department of Justice said that these allegations had spanned a decade, from 2011 to 2021.
Last week, it was announced that Booz Allen settled to pay the United States $377 million to resolve the allegations – and Feinberg and her lawyers received $69 million for her part, thanks to the little-known qui tam procedure.
The qui tam move allows an insider to sue on behalf of the U.S. and then recover between 15 and 30 percent of any settlement or judgement.
Of the $69 million settlement, Feinberg was personally awarded $40 million for reporting her employer’s alleged behavior – $12 million of which she intends to donate to charity.
Feinberg had no intention of profiting from her decision to blow the whistle on the company, and said she wasn’t aware she could until taking her findings to the Justice Department.
The Daily Mail has additional information here.
Category: Veterans in the news
This type fraud, on this scale, happens every single day.
Now I don’t feel so bad for charging a hotel room for strippers to TAH. At least I paid the strippers out of pocket. 😉
Just don’t claim it as a business expense on your taxes.
Bad dog.
You seen The Telemarketers yet? I think 20% of the US GDP is just fraud.
Think All-Points Logistics.
Mr. Booz can claim that he was drinking too much Booz and didn’t know that he was overcharging the gov’t and since he drank too much Booz, he can say that he wasn’t responsible because of what the Booz did to his thinking and he will be sent to a Booz re-hab center that deals with peeps with Booz problems.
Booz Allen. Drunk again? Oh to be a fly on the wall when they wrote those checks.
Kudos to this woman.
Agree.
But kinda suprised she did not know she could get paid….
If she did not, give half to charity. It will send a message.
She did send a portion to either her church, church school or charity of some type.
I’m sure wherever she sent it to, it was not something or someplace that Booz Allen would approve sending money to on their own.
Give it a couple years, they will be overcharging again to make up for the loss.
Anyone in prison yet?
From a nondescript 4 star hotel in Caracas Fat Leonard smiles.
I wonder how many retired flags are/were on the board of Booz-Allen.
BZ Marine! Put her in charge of the GAO. She’s easy on the eyes, too.
Glad she got a nice chunk of change for it, but I think the total settlement the fed dot guv got was way yonder too low. Did her settlement come from the total amount of $377 million? That lowers the fed dot guv’s take to near $300 million out of the $500 million these bastards stole. And that’s just an estimate of what they stole. $6.5 BILLION in profits? A year? This fine is not even a slap on the wrist and as pointed out above, nobody has gone to jail.
“…to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”
There will come a reckoning…Prepare
As the saying goes, “You Booz…..you lose.”
What I wonder, was Booz Allen able to the 10% for the Big Guy back, or did they have to make up the difference from their own pockets?
I wonder if Wilted Willy could do this same thing to his nefarious brother?
Just remember, this is the same company that kept Edward Snowden employed after multiple screwups.
They’re probably happy he isn’t in the news anymore. Yet.
Ukraine just laughs
In my assignment as an IG, my unofficial motto was “a dime dropped is a dime well-spent.” While it didn’t happen too often I did enjoy the times someone with a legitimate command-induced problem got redress. And I especially like seeing sleazy contractors get hammered.
Speaking of corruption, I came across this.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/08/30/old-mules/