A government contractor who was terminated after blowing the whistle on his company, Shaw Environment and Infrastructure Inc. (“Shaw”), for overcharging the government for work at military installations secured a jury verdict of $3.4 million last week.  According to Law360, the whistleblower, Paul Blakeslee, discovered that an employee at Shaw had created a private leasing [...]

A former employee of BAE Systems Information Solutions has sued the company, alleging that he was retaliated against for raising concerns about the company’s fraudulent billing practices.  Cornelius Hosch, an Iraq veteran who was employed by the company as a Region Manager for the Counter-IED Intelligence Analytical Teams (“CIAT”) in the Regional Command East (“RC-E”), [...]

Federal contractors received a significant expansion in whistleblower protections under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 (“2013 NDAA”), signed into law by President Obama on January 4, 2013.  As we wrote in this blog after the bill passed the Senate, federal contractors are one of the largest sectors of employees in the country, with [...]

Federal contractor whistleblower rights are set for a significant expansion after the Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 (“2013 NDAA”) on December 21, 2013, which contains important whistleblower protection provisions.  The bill has now passed both Houses of Congress and is awaiting President Obama’s signature.  Encompassing approximately 12 million employees, federal contractors [...]

Department of Defense (“DOD”) contractor employees cost almost three times as much as an average DOD civilian employee performing the same job, according to research conducted by the Project on Government Oversight (“POGO”) last month.   A total of $254 billion was spent by the Pentagon on contract employees in 2010, as compared to just $108 [...]

William Holowecki, formerly employed as the Information Systems Security Manager at Avaya Government Solutions, alleged in a complaint filed on July 12, 2012, that Avaya terminated him in violation of the False Claims Act (“FCA”) after he discovered, documented and reported false certifications made by Avaya to a federal government agency regarding unauthorized access to [...]

The Project on Government Oversight (“POGO”) Blog has an eye-opening piece this week about Mike Helms entitled “The Whistleblower Who Fell Through the Cracks.”  Mr. Helms was an intelligence specialist deployed to the Army’s 902nd Military Intelligence Group.  When the Humvee he was riding in was hit by a roadside bomb, Helms suffered severe brain [...]

The first living Marine to receive the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War has filed suit for retaliation and defamation against his former employer, BAE Systems OASYS, LLC.  Marine Sergeant Dakota Meyer was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Obama in September 2011 for his heroic actions in Afghanistan in September 2009, where [...]

On August 29, the Department of Labor published a final rule regarding the displacement of service workers during changes of contract, implementing a policy initiative President Obama started shortly after taking office.  The rule states that service contracts must have a clause that requires successor contractors to offer displaced workers the same positions for which [...]

With the US government’s continued reliance on defense contractors to provide services to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign employees have become an integral part of subcontractors’ workforce; but their experiences have been blighted by unfair labor practices and human rights violations, possibly to include human trafficking.  In a recent New Yorker article, “Invisible Army,” [...]