A new Senate subcommittee report accuses one of the largest private military housing companies of maintaining many of the same problems that resulted in a 2021 guilty plea for defrauding the Pentagon.
The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released its report “Mistreatment of Military Families in Privatized Housing” on Tuesday. The panel is holding a hearing on it scheduled for later in the day. The report focused on Balfour Beatty Communities, one of the largest private military housing companies, which operates more than 43,000 on-base homes at 55 separate Army, Navy, and Air Force bases in 26 states and serves more than 150,000 residents.
The committee “has uncovered ongoing mistreatment of these service members and their families and mismanagement,” and the behavior “bear[s] striking similarities to the types of conduct which Balfour admitted to in its December 2021 guilty plea for actions it took between 2013 and 2019,” the report says.
The report found that Balfour staff routinely ignored or delayed responding to residents’ complaints about problems such as mold and leaking roofs. In many cases, family members with health problems had their conditions worsen as a result of the lack of care.
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Capt. Samuel Choe, a former resident at the Army’s Fort Gordon in Georgia; Tech. Sgt. Jack Fe Torres, a resident at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas, which is also run by Balfour; Jana Wanner, a military spouse; and Rachel Christian, the founder of Armed Forces Housing Advocates, will testify during the hearing. Richard C. Taylor and Paula Cook, representatives of Balfour, will testify during a second panel.
The inquiry’s key findings were that Balfour’s staff at Fort Gordon “frequently ignored or delayed responding to urgent requests,” that they “repeatedly failed to clean or to make basic repairs to homes,” and that there were “numerous examples of inaccuracies and omissions in” their internal work order tracking system.
Last December, Balfour pleaded guilty to committing major fraud against the United States from 2013 to 2019. Their fraudulent activities included manipulating and falsifying its military housing work order data to pad their statistics in order to reach performance-based incentives. The company was ordered to pay $65.4 million in fines and restitution.
“Instead of promptly repairing housing for U.S. service members as required, [Balfour] lied about the repairs to pocket millions of dollars in performance bonuses,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said at the time the guilty plea was announced. “This pervasive fraud was a consequence of [Balfour’s] broken corporate culture, which valued profit over the welfare of service members.”
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Cook admitted to the committee in an interview that she knew Belfour was not implementing repairs promised to residents. She did not directly supervise the facility manager who was in charge at Fort Gordon and did not take steps to investigate the problems.
A former Balfour employee alleged to the committee that two successive facility managers at the base advised families to contact them for maintenance repair verbally instead of through the online portal. Then, when a service member would follow up, they would allege that they hadn’t reported it because it wasn’t in the online system.
