Government investigators believe Environmental Protection Agency officials may have paid a contractor nearly $1 million more than they should have for operating a telephone hotline that processed fewer calls than claimed.
The EPA inspector general said it received a hotline tip about possible contract fraud in its information office. That office handles inquiries from the general public and internal EPA customers, using a contractor to provide call center services.
At one point, the agency relied on the number of calls and emails the center was receiving to approve a jump in prices. At another, the agency cited the number of reported issues, which could have been the subject of multiple calls or emails to justify lower prices.
The inconsistent decision-making “increases the risk that the EPA may be overcharged for call center services,” the IG said.
The EPA was also spending more than it was making on the call center. Losing money prompted the agency to use the number of issues, not the volume of calls, as an excuse to lower its contract price even though the call volume had not fallen below the minimum levels needed to make such a change.
The contractor providing call center services told the EPA the number of calls and emails coming in were on the rise in order to secure higher prices, but the agency never checked to verify the claim.
The contractor was unable to document a higher volume of calls as the grounds for its request when asked to do so by the IG.
The contractor was able to produce detailed contact data from nearly every month of its agreement with the EPA except the three it used to justify raising prices.
As a result, EPA may have overpaid as much as $910,776, due to the contractor’s lack of supporting data and shifting methods for determining prices.
The call center contract cost the EPA nearly $11.5 million between October 2010 and September 2014, the report said.
Go here to read the full EPA IG report.
