People, Technology and Processes: Billing Before the Job Began and After It Ended

People, Technology and Processes and its principals paid $320,000 to resolve allegations of billing for work never performed on an Army subcontract in Afghanistan. The government alleged that signed invoices charged for employees on leave abroad, an employee already fired and flown home, and employees who had not yet started work. If you knew who was actually working, you could recognize the difference between those invoices and the people behind them.

The Justice Department announced the settlement on March 1, 2017. It described the company, known as PTP, as an information technology and professional services company in Lakeland, Florida. A company employee brought the False Claims Act case.

How the Subcontract Invoices Reached the Army

The Justice Department alleged that PTP billed the prime contractor, which paid PTP and then billed those costs to the United States. In that account, the government paid the bills, and PTP and its principals knew where their invoices would ultimately go and who would pay them.

During 2011 and 2012, PTP worked under a contract awarded by the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command through the Strategic Sources Services program. PTP’s place in that arrangement explains why a service invoice addressed to another business became a claim on public money.

The prime holds the government contract, while a subcontractor supplies goods or services to the prime or another subcontractor. In a subcontractor billing case, we follow both transactions: the supplier’s charge and the bill that carries it to the government.

Here, the alleged falsehood began with the work PTP said its employees had performed. Following that charge through the prime connects an attendance discrepancy inside the subcontractor to the Army money that paid for it.

What the Signed Invoices Allegedly Counted

The government alleged that PTP submitted the improper invoices between November 2011 and June 2012. According to the allegations, its president and chief executive, its chief financial officer, or both signed them. The allegations covered different points in an employee’s working life: time away during employment, time after departure and time before the job began.

A Month of Leave in Another Country

The Justice Department alleged that PTP billed for one employee while that employee spent a month in another country on R&R. The alleged charge was for work in Afghanistan during the absence. For someone familiar with leave and deployment dates, the comparison is specific: where that employee was during the period the company billed.

Charges After Termination and the Flight Home

PTP allegedly billed for another employee for several weeks after terminating the employee and flying the person back to the United States. In the government’s account, the employer submitting the invoices had also ended the employment and arranged the return home. We see a company that could get the employee out of Afghanistan but could not get the employee off the bill.

Charges Before the Work Began

The government also alleged that PTP billed one or more weeks for two employees before they actually started working for the company. An insider who knew the actual start dates could explain a discrepancy that the billed total would never reveal.

What the Settlement Paid

The government alleged $127,990 in improper billing for work those employees never performed. PTP and its principals paid more than that alleged billing total to settle the case.

The whistleblower also received a share of the settlement proceeds, according to the announcement. A whistleblower case under the False Claims Act can pay 15% to 30% of what the government recovers.

The Employee Who Raised the Billing Problem

The whistleblower worked for PTP in 2012 and disclosed some of the conduct inside the company. The employee then brought the case under the False Claims Act’s whistleblower provisions. The case was investigated by the Tampa Resident Agency of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command’s Major Procurement Fraud Unit, and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

For an employee looking at similar invoices, the internal account can explain more than a billing total. Who was away, who had left and who had started are details that make a charge understandable. We work with the person who knows those details to connect them to the payment and the decisions behind it.

What Evidence Is Needed to Prove Fraud?

For this kind of absent-worker billing, the evidence connects the work claimed, the employee’s actual dates, the people approving the charge and the government’s payment. We examine the records behind that comparison with you. The PTP allegations show why the same invoice can need different explanations for different employees.

A leave record addresses time away during an assignment. A termination date and return travel address the end of it. A start date addresses whether the employee had begun working at all. We compare the relevant dates with the billed period, then follow the signed invoice into the prime contractor’s charge to the government.

Employee detail can disappear inside a larger payment request. In a separate Afghanistan logistics audit summarized in its Semiannual Report to the Congress for April through September 2018, the Defense Department’s inspector general described supporting documents that combined costs for hundreds of employees into a single sum for one employee. The documents covered labor, employee travel and employee bonuses. The detail that would let a reviewer distinguish one person’s costs from another’s had been rolled together.

That audit also found that the Army paid the logistics contractors’ vouchers with little or no examination of their supporting documentation. It identified direct labor costs for employees not physically present in Afghanistan. The connection to an insider’s knowledge is plain: a payment request can move forward while the people behind its labor charges remain out of view.

That finding helps explain why we work back from a total to the people and periods it represents. Someone who knows the employees’ assignments can bring the missing context to a bill that otherwise presents only a sum. In the PTP allegations, the leave, departure and start dates supplied precisely the kind of contrast a total alone could not explain.

You Know Who Was There

If the invoices kept counting someone you knew was away, gone or still waiting to start, tell our whistleblower experts about the charges you saw. We build the case around your knowledge of the work and bring in defense contractor whistleblower lawyers who understand subcontract labor billing. You have a partner through the case, from making sense of the first discrepancy to pursuing the government’s recovery.