DOE contractors make $130,000 goof, audit shows

Saturday, June 28, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

In one case, Bechtel paid $8,000 for a series of classes that one former test site employee never attended.

"We found that contractors paid for training classes that employees had not requested, made duplicate payments to vendors, overpaid vendors and paid for courses that employees did not complete," John C. Layton, the Energy Department's inspector general, said in the audit.

"Additionally, contractors made record-keeping errors including posting transactions to the wrong employee accounts and not posting refunds properly," Layton said.

The Nevada Operations Office, which runs the test site for the Energy Department, disputed the total of $130,000. The audit acknowledged the figure was based on a projected sample from 86 files of 729 former employees. But the audit added the projection was made with a "95 percent confidence level."

"We agreed that $38,355 in errors were made, and we are in the process of getting that money back," Nevada Operations Office spokeswoman Roxanne Dey told the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Friday.

Ms. Dey estimated the department has recovered almost $10,000 of the misspent money so far.

The audit spanned Oct. 1, 1992, through July 31, 1996, when the number of contractor employees at the test site plummeted from 8,000 to 2,900.

Reasons for the downsizing included the nuclear testing moratorium that began in 1992 and the consolidation in 1996 from three major contractors (EG&G Inc., Reynolds Electrical & Engineering Co. Inc. and Raytheon Services Nevada) to one (Bechtel Nevada Corp.).

A 1993 National Defense Act authorized the department to offer educational assistance of no more than $10,000 each to terminated contractor employees so they could obtain new jobs. One purpose of the audit was to determine if reasonable assistance was provided to the 729 former workers who applied.

The audit found that an inadequate set of internal controls established by the Nevada contractors led to the erroneous payments.

For example, a woman who was a former employee visited a school to ask about the different types of training and the cost. Although the woman never enrolled, the unnamed school billed Bechtel Nevada about $8,000 for a series of classes. Even after the woman told Bechtel Nevada she was not taking any classes, the contractor paid the bill.

Ms. Dey said most of the errors occurred during the consolidation. Bechtel Nevada took over as the sole major contractor and made a good faith effort to pay all bills, including some incurred by previous contractors, she said.

"We are following a new procedure so that this does not happen again," Ms. Dey said.