Washington River Protection Solutions LLC (WRPS) is paying $5,275,000 to settle federal allegations of sustained time card fraud at the Hanford Tank Farms site between October 2008 and July 2013. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Washington announced the settlement, detailing a five-year pattern of false claims submitted to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for overtime and premium pay under corrupt internal practices.
Despite being warned by federal law enforcement immediately after winning the Hanford contract in 2008 about widespread timecard fraud under prior management, WRPS allegedly did nothing to stop it. For five years, the company maintained the same lax oversight and accounting procedures that allowed workers to falsify hours. Managers allegedly turned a blind eye as employees routinely claimed overtime without substantiating the work performed—depriving the DOE of any real ability to verify labor costs.
One of the most brazen schemes involved the misuse of Emergency Call In (ECI) overtime pay. Under the Collective Bargaining Agreement, ECI was reserved for true emergencies with less than 16 hours’ notice. Yet WRPS workers were routinely allowed to classify routine overtime as ECI—racking up inflated labor rates at taxpayer expense. The DOJ alleges this practice cost the government hundreds of thousands in fraudulent overpayments.
Adding insult to injury, WRPS placed its own general counsel—a person with no auditing experience—at the head of its Internal Audit Department for the first three years of the contract. This move, while known in structure to the DOE, concealed the deeper dysfunction: the general counsel allegedly ran daily audit operations and actively avoided meaningful scrutiny of the timecard fraud. Internal oversight was not just weak—it was weaponized to conceal wrongdoing.
The prior DOE contractor, CH2M Hill Hanford Group Inc. (CHG), had already admitted criminal conspiracy with employees to submit false time cards from 1999 to 2008. With that history, WRPS’s failure to institute basic controls wasn’t just negligent—it was reckless. The DOJ made clear: continuing the same flawed system while ignoring red flags amounted to knowing complicity in financial fraud against the federal government.
Only after DOE uncovered the full extent of WRPS’s internal audit failures did the agency force leadership changes, mandating the removal of the general counsel from audit oversight and the hiring of a qualified audit manager. The $5.275 million settlement resolves the civil claims but leaves no doubt: at Hanford, timecard fraud didn’t stop in 2008. It was enabled—and allowed to thrive—under WRPS’s watch.
Related Federal Cases
- $3B Recovered in Health Fraud Crackdown · Washington
- Banker Michael Thompson Sentenced for $5M Fraud · Washington
- FDIC Cracks Down on False Advertising: The Truth Behind the Insurance Scams · Washington
- Contractor John McClure Faces Decade-Long Prison Term in Fraud Scam · Washington
- McClure and Chambers Sentenced for $1.5M Contractor Fraud Scheme · Washington
Key Facts
- State: Washington
- Agency: DOJ USAO
- Category: Fraud & Financial Crimes
- Source: Official Source ↗
🔒 Get the grimiest stories delivered weekly. Subscribe free →
Browse More
MORE FEDERAL CRIME NEWS
US NewsUS NewsUS NewsUS News