One of the military’s largest housing contractors reportedly misled the Air Force into awarding it lucrative bonus payments by falsifying records.
An investigation by Reuters and CBS News discovered that Balfour Beatty Communities falsified data in at least one base in order to qualify for big bonuses, resulting in an FBI investigation.
At Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, the company would allegedly fudge the times of service requests in order to appear to have a faster response time. Quick response times allowed the company to qualify for the lucrative bonuses.
Some of the houses managed by Balfour Beatty were also in poor condition. Internal records show that Nick and Paige Ippolito, a couple with an infant child that live at Tinker, had a home with asbestos-filled tile. A maintenance technician with Balfour Beatty who responded to a leak at their house expressed concern that the couple’s infant child could become ill by chewing on the asbestos-filled floor tiles, but that information was not relayed to the couple.
“It’s very upsetting to know that he was concerned for our child’s safety but didn’t tell us,” Paige Ippolito said.
“I mean, we already risk our lives every day, you know, you think you’ve got your family home safe,” Nick Ippolito said. “And to find out that, you know, you got your kid eating asbestos floor.”
Records also showed that the response time to the leak also appeared to be falsified. The maintenance records say the call was put in at 4:32 p.m. and that the problem was fixed by 4:52 p.m.
“It’s a physical impossibility to fix something of that extent in 20 minutes,” Nick Ippolito said.
It is alleged that at the time, employees at the contractor kept two sets of books. They would record calls on paper and only enter them into the computer system — which was monitored by the Air Force — after a job was almost done, leading to the perception that the company was responding promptly to the issues of residents.
Tina Brown, a former Balfour Beatty employee who scheduled repairs at Tinker in 2014, said that the company told her not to enter calls into the computer system when they came in because, “The management was all concerned about appearances and collecting their bonuses.”
Brown was fired in 2016 and is now suing on the grounds of wrongful termination. She said she felt like a scapegoat. Since 2015, military housing officials issued more than a dozen warnings about the company’s maintenance logs, with the military stopping incentive payments to Balfour Beatty last year.
Balfour Beatty said in a statement that it “has not and does not condone the falsification of records in any way.” The company said the allegations from Tinker are from years ago and that after an Air Force investigation, only a single employee was found to have acted improperly.
Problems with housing managed by private contractors have plagued other military families at a number of military bases. In February, top military leaders met with top executives at seven private housing companies to express concerns with living conditions. Residents have had issues with mold, rodents, and lead and asbestos exposure.
