“Claims will come in, reserves will be needed to fund those claims, and it is possible, if not likely, that there won’t be enough capital to fund future claims.”

From Managed Care Matters

by Joe Paduda

Welcome to our new DBA Forum

We’re no Lexis Nexis but we’re free and we’ll do our best to keep you informed on whats going on behind the scenes with DBA claims in the Department of  Labor’s Administrative Law System

Misjudgements

Today we have what appears to be another case of an Administrative Law Judge trying to change the law against the contractor.

This case also provides some interesting insight into payroll and safety practices KBR and Halliburton have been accused of indulging in.

“Claimant raised concerns regarding the computation of his pay, the adequacy of the employer-provided living quarters, and safety issues involving the manner in which electrical work was being performed.

Claimant stated that he was instructed by employer’s security personnel to get into a military vehicle.
Claimant stated that he refused to do as instructed because he did not think the trip to BAB was safe.  After two MPs arrived, the IG intervened but ultimately turned the situation back over to them, leading to repeated requests that claimant get into the vehicle.
Claimant’s continued refusal to do as asked prompted the MPs to take action. As one MP handcuffed claimant’s hands behind his back, the second attempted to put claimant into body armor. Claimant repeatedly resisted the MP’s efforts, and stated that before he knew it, he was on the ground. The MPs then pulled claimant up from the ground, placed him into the vest, and put him into the vehicle. At that time, he was driven to Camp Phoenix, where he immediately informed the MPs that his neck, shoulder and wrist were hurting. He was treated at employer’s clinic for these injuries.“

The players:  Halliburton, AIG, an injured contractor

http://www.dol.gov/brb/decisions/lngshore/published/07-0810.pdf

As the administrative law judge’s denial of benefits
relied on his findings that claimant was at fault, or that the injury-causing incident did not directly involve employer or its personnel, it is in error. Given the totality of the administrative law judge’s discussion, it is apparent that his conclusion that claimant’s injuries are not within the scope of employment was inappropriately influenced by those determinations.

Forgotten and Ignored:  The Shadow Army Awaits Deployment

By: Rayne Monday November 30, 2009 6:55 pm

I was taken to task for allegedly ignoring the role of military-industrial complex corporations in my recent post about the decision-making process leading up to tomorrow’s anticipated announcement regarding U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. Concern about corporate interests is well-placed, but it’s only a portion of the picture. Contractors have been a nagging problem since the U.S. began military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. With a current ratio of nearly two contractors to every soldier, the immediate problem is the number of the non-military personnel — a virtual shadow army — we are about to deploy in an escalation in Afghanistan, and the one still on the ground in Iraq.

Coincidentally, today represents the deadline which House Oversight and Government Reform Chair Eldolphus Towns set for Defense Secretary Robert Gates to report the number, size, and details of contracts awarded for work being performed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Towns’ letter is dated November 3, giving Gates nearly a month to get his hands around these numbers and report them.

Towns has even allowed Gates to report the numbers from the Department of Defense’s records without commenting in his letter about the rather disconcerting numbers Towns has already seen based on reports from the General Accounting Office and the Commission on Wartime Contracting.

The CWC, a bipartisan entity authorized by and reporting to Congress, reported a wide range of numbers depending on the tracking source. The DOD’s Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker (SPOT) reported 160,000 contractors working for the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and several other smaller and less active arenas this summer. However the U.S. Army Central Command’s quarterly census reported a much different number — 242,000 contractors, with much of the data gathered by hand rather than through reports. As the CWC noted, that’s a difference of roughly 80,000 between the two tallies.

Although CENTCOM’s census doesn’t include contractors working for Department of State or the Agency for International Development (USAID) and SPOT does not account for foreign nationals, it’s generally believed that 80,000 is still too broad a spread in numbers and cannot account accurately for the difference in contractors between the two systems.

Read the full post here

Why not watch and see tomorrow night, Wednesday and beyond who really does ignore the shadow army we’ll be deploying?

Monday 30 November 2009

Truthout

Recently, the Congressional Research Service released an amazing statistic – it will cost one million dollars a year to support one soldier for one year in Afghanistan.

This mind-blowing number partly includes the cost of private contractors who have moved into areas of support that have been strictly military in the past. Estimates for the numbers of contractors have been as high as one contractor for every soldier. As President Obama prepares to announce his decision on Afghanistan, the price of this war is also on his mind since he included Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, in his last war council.

One of the reasons for the high costs of maintaining each soldier is the lack of oversight of private contractor billings over the course of these two wars. The Department of Defense (DOD), and especially the Army, has fought the auditors and the investigators in the military who have attempted to expose fraud, waste, overbillings and other abuses of costs in contractor contracts. The contractors, using contingency contracting, which is similar to the old cost plus contracts, knew that their profits and, more important, their future task orders and contracts would be priced based on what they spend in the beginning of the wars. So the contractor billing meter, especially in labor costs, spun vigorously in the first years of the war with little oversight. When the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) tried to withhold a small percentage of payment from KBR, the largest contractor, because it believed that the billings were excessive and they wanted to scrub the numbers, the Army pushed past the DCAA and paid KBR the excessive costs. This set the tone to let the contractor billings run wild.

Click here to see Truthout’s Matt Renner interview Dina Rasor.

Click here to read full article by Dina Rasor at Truthout

Stay tuned . . . if you don’t hear about American war contracting fraud cases in the news, you will know that there is a group of very frustrated whistleblowers who cannot legally tell you what is going on with fraud in our wars.

Ex-Indiana Soldier Who Blamed Cancer On Chemical Dies

WILLIAMS, Ind. (AP) – A formerIndiana National Guard commander has died after suffering from lung cancer he believed was caused by exposure to toxic chemicals in Iraq.

A funeral home says 52-year-old retired Lt. Col. James Gentry died Wednesday at his home in the southern Indiana community of Williams.

Gentry was commander of the 1st Battalion, 152nd Infantry, which was assigned to guard a water pumping plant in Basrah, Iraq, shortly after the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Several soldiers from the unit have sued defense contractor KBR Inc., alleging it knowingly allowed them to be exposed to a known carcinogen. Houston-based KBR denies any wrongdoing.

Gentry was not a party to the suit but believed his cancer was caused by exposure.

Services will be Tuesday at Kraft Funeral Service in New Albany.

Original Story here

This Thanksgiving if you happen to be giving thanks for your home and the food on your table,  we hope you take a minute to think about the injured contractors’ lives you’ve stomped all over to get them.

Do your families know the things you do to other families for financial gain?

Houston Chronicle

A Houston judge ruled today that Halliburton must remain as a defendant in a lawsuit alleging it and its former subsidiary KBR knowingly sent civilian truck convoys into dangerous conditions the day six drivers were killed in 2004 in Iraq.

U.S. District Judge Gray Miller found that Halliburton should remain in the case because plaintiffs have “numerous evidentiary examples of Halliburton’s involvement in the allegations giving rise to this litigation.”

Miller is considering a series of motions raised by the defendants to end three cases brought by injured plaintiffs and family members of the dead. The plaintiffs allege that KBR and its former parent, Halliburton, put profit above life in April 2004 when they deployed a convoy knowing about the heightened danger.

Miller previously dismissed the case, ruling that a civilian court could not second-guess military decisions. But the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to Miller saying it may be possible to resolve the lawsuits without making a “constitutionally impermissible review of wartime decision-making.”

Halliburton spun off KBR in 2007. Last January it stated that it was paying off its final bill for KBR when it agreed to pay about $560 million to settle a Foreign Corrupt Practice Act case involving improper payments to Nigerian officials.

Halliburton has maintained the truck convoy lawsuits are based on KBR activity in Iraq, and Halliburton will be found to have no responsibility, legal or otherwise.

Miller did toss other corporate entities out of the lawsuit. KBR Inc. stays in the case. But KBR Holdings LLC and KBR International Inc. were let out. Also dropped from the suit were Halliburton Energy Services and DII Industries.

mary.flood@chron.com

11/24/2009 9:57:59 PM

THE COMMISSION ON WARTIME CONTRACTING IN IRAQ & AFGHANISTAN HOLDS A HEARING ON ACCOUNTABILITY ISSUES IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN, PANEL 1
NOVEMBER 2, 2009

“Counting Contractors: Where Are They and What Are They Doing?” carries the theme of accountability into three important areas of the commission’s work.

I offer this opening on behalf of Co-chair Christopher Shays and myself.

The other commissioners at the dais are Clark Kent Ervin, Grant Green, Robert Henke, Charles Tiefer, and Dov Zakheim.

There is currently one vacancy on the eight-member commission awaiting a congressional appointment.

Read the transcript here

With the associated increases of one contractor to one soldier

What a windfall for AIG and CNA

From the Huffington Post

President Barack Obama is expected to announce a “sizable” increase in US troop levels in Afghanistan early next week, tentatively during a prime-time speech on Tuesday, December 1, according to media reports.

Obama met with his war council on Monday evening to decide how many troops to send in addition to the 68,000 already deployed. According to the Associated Press, “Military officials and others said they expect Obama to settle on a middle-ground option that would deploy an eventual 32,000 to 35,000 U.S. forces to the 8-year-old conflict.” McClatchy is reporting that Obama plans to send 34,000. General Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in the region, had been pressing for 40,000.

After Obama’s announcement next Tuesday, General McChrystal, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, are expected to testify on Capitol Hill.

The president had been reluctant to make a decision without an exit strategy, a theme echoed today by Robert Gibbs. The White House press secretary told reporters that it’s “not just how we get people there, but what’s the strategy for getting them out.”

Below, an official White House photo by Pete Souza of President Obama meeting last night with his national security team to discuss Afghanistan in the Situation Room.

Thanks to DC Bureau and Adam Lichtenheld

In late August 2003, medical testing of KBR employees at Qarmat Ali found elevated levels of total chromium in their blood. Total chromium is comprised of trivalent chromium—an essential and naturally occurring nutrient—and hexavalent chromium, the cancer-causing industrial component of sodium dichromate. In order to adequately determine if its workers were poisoned by sodium dichromate, KBR needed to separate out hexavalent chromium from the blood tests—a difficult and time-consuming process that usually requires a special laboratory.

But no such effort was even attempted. The reason, according to KBR Medical Director Robert Conte, lies in an archaic legal precedent, one that has forbidden sick KBR workers, such as Mr. Blacke and Mr. Langford, from seeking legal redress.

Under the Defense Base Act of 1941, private contractors working for the military are protected from legal liability for injuries suffered by their employees. Under the DBA, contractors transfer a work-related claim to a government insurer, which handles the claim and determines compensation. For KBR workers who became too sick to work at Qarmat Ali, this meant that their appeals for unemployment and disability benefits were turned over to American International Group, Inc, the world’s largest insurance company and the government’s handler of 90 percent of all DBA cases.

Since AIG retained full responsibility for KBR’s claims, it was at their discretion—not KBR’s—whether to follow up by ordering further blood tests. Determining the amount of hexavalent chromium in workers’ blood would have been critical to link their illnesses to the exposure at Qarmat Ali, thus making them eligible for worker’s compensation. AIG decided against it.

“When AIG picked it up, we figured they’d just follow up and do what they thought necessary at that point,” said Dr. Conte in a sworn deposition videotaped last year.

The Defense Base Act is a lucrative and low-cost deal for companies like AIG. Since the insurance giant works for the government in DBA cases, both premiums and payout claims are paid for by public funds. As a result, when AIG overcharged KBR tens of millions of dollars for DBA insurance in the first several years of the Iraq war—as the Army Audit Agency eventually discovered—U.S. taxpayers footed the bill. The findings of the audit investigation surfaced last fall, around the time that AIG was rescued from financial ruin by an $85 billion taxpayer bailout.

KBR, meanwhile, continues to use the DBA to shield it from accountability.

“KBR took the attitude…that there was nothing anyone was going to be able to do about [Qarmat Ali] because they were immune from lawsuit and/or any other accountability,” Langford said.

Original Story here