Washington River Protection Solutions: Admitted Idle-Time Reimbursement in the 2025 Resolution

Washington River Protection Solutions paid $6.5 million in its 2025 idle-time settlement, admitting it collected Department of Energy reimbursement for excessive idle time at Hanford. The company admitted it had not assigned enough work. An employee brought the case. If you assign work, record time or review labor charges, the gap between an unfilled shift and a fully billed one may be familiar.

The Justice Department’s June 24, 2025 announcement concerned WRPS’s management and operation of the Hanford Tank Farms in Washington. Those farms contain 176 large underground tanks holding millions of gallons of mixed hazardous and radioactive waste.

What Washington River Protection Solutions Admitted

WRPS admitted that from October 1, 2017, through December 31, 2024, it sought and received Department of Energy reimbursement for labor hours consisting of unallowable excessive idle time. It also admitted that it did not schedule or assign sufficient work to its personnel.

The government’s allegations explain how the time reached the bill. According to the Justice Department, management knew about inflated labor hours and failed to prevent them. The government alleged that WRPS left employees without enough assignments to fill a shift, then directed them to record their time as though they had worked the entire shift. Those recorded hours became claims for payment.

The settlement included $3 million in restitution to the Department of Energy. The Justice Department described the total payment as more than double the damage to the department and taxpayers. The contractor controlled the assignments. Taxpayers paid for the hours it left unfilled.

How Idle Time Reached the Government’s Bill

WRPS’s cost-plus-award-fee contract allowed reimbursement of claimed allowable costs, including labor. That payment structure connected the company’s time records to federal spending. In the government’s account, recording a full shift despite insufficient assignments inflated the labor cost WRPS claimed.

Under the federal contract-pricing framework, a cost-plus-award-fee arrangement reimburses allowable costs and can pay a base fee and an award based on performance. What work was assigned, what employees recorded and what the contractor sought to recover all belong in the same inquiry.

Federal cost-reimbursement billing rules require the contractor to support its cost claims. That gives the accounting records a different job from the work schedule. A schedule shows the work available to the crew. Cost records connect the labor to the government’s bill.

In false timecard and idle-time cases, we follow that connection through the contractor. In this case, the alleged full-shift entries supplied the hours, and the company’s admitted reimbursement supplied the payment connection. The work assignment was where the discrepancy began. The government’s money was where it ended.

When Management Directs the Time Entry

The allegation that managers directed full-shift recording makes their instructions part of the billing story. A person entering time may know both how much work was available and what management told the crew to record. That knowledge can explain a time entry that looks ordinary on its own.

A study in the Journal of Forensic and Investigative Accounting, Unique Characteristics of Management Override Fraud Cases, published in 2019, helps explain why formal controls can leave this problem untouched. It compared fraud cases where managers overrode controls with cases where controls were missing. The override cases were associated with stronger anti-fraud controls. Its point is that managers can circumvent controls already in place:

For the WRPS allegations, that is a useful way to think about the difference between a timekeeping policy and the instructions employees actually received. We want to understand who assigned the work, who directed the entry and how the charge moved forward. A formal approval tells us who accepted the record. The person who worked the shift can explain what that approval accepted.

The Earlier WRPS Overtime Settlement

The 2017 WRPS settlement addressed overtime, premium pay and internal-audit allegations concerning October 2008 through July 2013. The company paid $5,275,000 to resolve the allegations described in the Justice Department’s announcement.

Those allegations involved overtime accountability, emergency-call premium codes and compromised internal-audit independence. The later idle-time case concerned insufficient assigned work and the reimbursement that followed, and an employee brought it through a qui tam complaint.

We see the absurdity in the sequence: WRPS settled labor-charging allegations in January 2017, and its admitted idle-time reimbursement began that October. Same contractor. Another labor bill for taxpayers.

Other Hanford Contractors Admitted Excessive Idle-Time Charges

Bechtel and AECOM admitted overcharging the Department of Energy for unreasonable and unallowable idle time experienced by craft personnel between 2009 and 2019. Their September 2020 settlement required $57,750,000 and concerned Hanford’s Waste Treatment Plant. Management allegedly left craft workers without adequate assignments and billed the excessive idle time. Four employees brought the whistleblower case.

The connection to WRPS is the work-assignment decision: management controlled the supply of work while the government reimbursed the labor.

Hanford Mission Integration Solutions later admitted that, at times, it had not scheduled or assigned sufficient work to its personnel. Its settlement announced in March 2026 concerned reimbursement for unallowable idle time from August 17, 2020, through September 30, 2025. The company paid $3,450,000, and an employee brought the case.

Across these matters, the practical question is who supplied the work behind the hours. An employee who knows the assignments can explain something the reimbursement request does not show: how a full labor charge arose from a shift without enough work.

What Proof Do You Need as a Whistleblower?

For an idle-time billing case, the useful evidence connects assignments, recorded hours and the government’s payment. We examine that connection with the person who knows the work. In WRPS’s case, the government alleged management awareness and directions to record full shifts, making those instructions part of the comparison too.

We line up schedules, timecards, supervisor approvals and the resulting charges and payments for the same shifts. That lets us connect what you saw at work to what the government paid.

Different people may hold different parts of that account. A supervisor may know why assignments ran short. A timekeeper may know how employees were told to record the shift. A billing employee may understand where the resulting cost entered the claim. Our work is to connect that operational knowledge to the representation made to the government.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Washington and the Department of Energy Office of Inspector General jointly investigated the WRPS matter.

How Much Money Can a Whistleblower Get From a Qui Tam Lawsuit?

A whistleblower case under the False Claims Act can pay 15% to 30% of what the government recovers. In the WRPS case, the Justice Department said the employee would receive a $1.4 million whistleblower reward from the settlement.

The employee brought allegations of labor mischarging from inside the company. The resulting resolution included both a government recovery and admissions about the work WRPS assigned and the reimbursement it collected. Someone who understands a shift, its assignments and its time entries can bring knowledge that the billing figures alone do not convey.

You Know What Filled the Shift

If you saw full labor charges for shifts management had not filled with work, speak to one of our Whistleblower Experts about the shifts you saw billed. We work beside you to build your strongest idle-time whistleblower case from the assignments, instructions and charges, and bring in government procurement whistleblower lawyers who understand cost-reimbursement contracts. You bring the view from inside the work; we bring the expertise and partnership to pursue it with you.