Complacency Breeds Corruption in Contracting

Oh, boy, this one is a doozy. If you haven't seen this yet, a WaPo article [1] from last week detailed the incestuous, often corrupt, relationships that can exist between officials and contractors within the broken culture of government contracting, and highlighted the lengths to which agencies will go to safeguard that decayed culture.

The story goes something like this: a frumpish government official, George Raymond, developed a close relationship with a contracting firm’s gregarious, attractive-ish government liaison, Catherine Campbell. Soon enough the relationship paid off for Campbell's small contracting firm, Enterprise Integration Inc., with a no-bid contract for consultation services to the Army. As their relationship grew, Raymond began to provide Campbell with sensitive information on future government contracts, which Enterprise Integration just happened to win as well. When the higher ups at Enterprise started to believe that Raymond and Campbell's relationship might bring too much heat, they dumped her. Raymond, in turn, canceled the contract with Enterprise and enlisted BearingPoint, a technology company Campbell just happened to join after leaving Enterprise.

Now, too many red flags were up and a do-gooder within the Army, Barbara Strong, began to push for an investigation of Raymond. According to Strong, Army officials did not want the investigation and attempted to torpedo it by assigning an unqualified colleague to look into the matter. Strong continued to push, and, after the Army deemed the first investigation insufficient, began a new inquiry. The second inquiry found that Raymond had acted improperly. Raymond resigned from his position before Army officials could remove him and then took a job with Computer Sciences Corp., now called CSC, a government-contracting firm. In light of Strong's whistle-blowing, the Army thanked her with a pink slip.

The outrageousness of this story lies not only in the alleged facts, but also in the sheer power of the culture of complacency within government contracting that it reveals. George Raymond admits that he "made a human mistake" by supplying Campbell with sensitive government contracting information, but rationalizes an improper relationship racked with conflicts of interest, by arguing, "It goes on all the time." He even offered this gem: "There's this concept of doing the right thing and doing the best thing...Sometimes you have to make a choice for the best thing." Really? Says whom, the Army's contracting manual under the header "Relativism?"

Just as perplexing is the resistance from Army officials shown Strong while attempting to spur an honest investigation of Raymond. Justifying their opposition, officials intimated to Strong that "there [is] nothing unusual about the apparent steering of a contract by military personnel to their friends within the defense community." Moreover, the culture saw to it that Strong lost her job for legitimately questioning the corrupt practices of a contracting official. With an endless supply of waste, fraud and abuse within government contracting similar to the example above, it seems safe to contend that complacency, or the notion that anything within the law is moral or that performing just up to an acceptable standard is okay and anything beyond is suspect, is the root of what is wrong with government contracting today.

Read the Washington Post article here [1]

Image by Flickr user frozenchipmunk [2] used under a Creative Commons license.