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November 27, 2020 By cs

CIA awards secret multibillion-dollar cloud contract

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has awarded its long-awaited Commercial Cloud Enterprise, or C2E, contract to five companies — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM.

Under the C2E contract vehicle, the companies will compete for specific task orders issued by the CIA on behalf of itself and the 16 other agencies that comprise the intelligence community. The CIA did not disclose the expected value of the contract to Nextgov, but procurement documents issued by the agency in 2019 indicated it could be worth “tens of billions” of dollars over the next decade and a half.

“We are excited to work with the multiple industry partners awarded the Intelligence Community (IC) Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) Cloud Service Provider (CSP) contract and look forward to utilizing, alongside our IC colleagues, the expanded cloud capabilities resulting from this diversified partnership,” CIA spokeswoman Nicole de Haay told Nextgov Friday.

C2E represents the CIA’s next step in cloud computing, having awarded an existing contract — dubbed C2S —to Amazon Web Services in 2013 to provide a variety of cloud computing services for the CIA and intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency and FBI.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2020/11/exclusive-cia-awards-secret-multibillion-dollar-cloud-contract/170227/

November 25, 2020 By cs

Employee of government contractor pleads guilty to fraud and kickback charges

An employee of a government contractor had pled guilty to his involvement in a scheme to overbill a contract administered by the General Services Administration (GSA) by approximately $1.25 million, and solicit and receive kickbacks from a subcontractor in exchange for providing that subcontractor valuable contract modifications.

Elmer Baker of Gulf Breeze, Florida, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate the anti-kickback statute and four counts of wire fraud in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Sentencing will be scheduled for a later date.

According to admissions made in connection with the plea agreement:

Baker served as the project manager for his company on the contract administered by the GSA.
After his company awarded a subcontract to a construction company for work on the facility, Baker began receiving kickbacks in the form of meals, golf sessions, vacations, and other things of value.
In or around 2015, Baker began demanding monetary kickbacks that were valued at 10 percent of the amount of each of the subcontract modifications that he awarded the subcontractor.
Baker sent the subcontractor fake invoices to make it appear as though the payments he was receiving were for legitimate work, and he set up a shell company to receive the payments.
Additionally, Baker took the subcontract estimates provided to him and illegally inflated them in his requests to the GSA.
Over the course of several subcontract modifications, Baker defrauded the GSA out of approximately $1.25 million.

Prosecution of his case was handled by the Justice Department’s Criminal Division’s Fraud Section, the nation’s leading prosecuting authority on government procurement fraud and corruption matters.

The GSA Office of Inspector General, FBI’s Washington Field Office, and the State Department Office of Inspector General were in charge of investigating this case.

Source: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/employee-government-contractor-pleads-guilty-fraud-and-kickback-charges

October 16, 2020 By cs

Former GSA contract specialist sentenced to prison for accepting bribes

A former government contract officer with the General Services Administration (GSA), was sentenced last week to a 21-month prison term on a federal bribery charge stemming from a scheme in which he accepted bribes from government contractors during a six-year period.

Ronnie Simpkins of Maryland pled guilty to the charge in December of last year.

According to the government’s evidence, from 1989 until May 2019, Simpkins was employed by GSA as a Contract Specialist in procurement related positions, and between August 2013 and May 2019. From February 2010 to August 2017, Simpkins was assigned to a sub-division of the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) which oversees the administration of GSA Schedule 70 contracts. “Schedules” are long-term government-wide contracts with commercial companies that provide access to commercial products and services at fair and reasonable prices to the government. “Schedule 70 contracts” provide IT solutions, services, and software to federal, state, and local customer agencies. GSA pre-negotiates the vendors’ pricing, terms, and conditions, to streamline the acquisition process while at the same time providing the best value to the end user agency.

According to court papers, Company A, a Northern Virginia corporation, held a GSA Schedule contract, which it actively advertised to prospective federal agency customers. To maintain its GSA Schedule contract, Company A was required to have annual sales in excess of $25,000 — a requirement that could be waived by GSA’s administrative contracting officer. Company A was also required to pay an Industrial Funding Fee (IFF) of 0.75% of all its Schedule sales. Dating back to 2006, Company A maintained its GSA Schedule contract despite reporting no sales and not paying any IFFs since 2006. Simpkins oversaw the contract dating back to 2009.

Simpkins admitted that, for approximately six years between 2011 and 2017, he accepted cash, meals, and furniture from two Company A officials to use his position to help Company A maintain its GSA Schedule contract. Simpkins admitted to meeting the Company A officials over a dozen times at various restaurants in Northern Virginia, the Company A officials’ residences, and other places, often outside of normal GSA business hours and on weekends. At these meetings, the Company A officials treated Simpkins to meals and gave him cash totaling “thousands of dollars into the teens.” In July 2016, Simpkins accepted more than $2,000 worth of furniture paid for by the officials. Simpkins admitted to taking more than $12,000 in cash and furniture from the Company A officials.

Simpkins admitted to using his GSA position to help Company A in exchange for these payments. Specifically, Simpkins recommended and signed Company A’s contracts with GSA, even though Company A:

failed to meet program requirements,
deliberately neglected to notify GSA, as he was obligated to do, when Company A’s contract under his supervision no longer met program requirements, and
advised Company A about ways to avoid contract cancellation despite failing to meet GSA’s program requirements.

United States District Judge Trevor N. McFadden, who presided over the case, sentenced Simpkins to 21 months in prison, followed by one year of supervised release. The Court also imposed a $10,000 fine and ordered Simpkins to forfeit $12,108.91.

The case was investigated by the FBI’s Washington Field Office Criminal Division and the GSA’s Office of Inspector General, and prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section.

Source: https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/former-federal-government-contract-officer-sentenced-prison-accepting-bribes

March 6, 2020 By cs

Contracting official sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for role in bribery scheme to rig VA contracts

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs official Dwane Nevins has been sentenced to serve 18 months in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release, for corruption offenses. He took cash bribes and then extorted undercover small business owners so that he could have his “Christmas.”

We first reported on the allegations against Nevins in September 2018. Then, in January of this year, we reported on the sentencing of a businessman who conspired with Nevins. Sentencing of one more individual in this case is scheduled later this month.

According to Court records, Dwane Nevins — a small business specialist at the VA’s Network Contracting Office in Colorado — agreed to take bribes offered by co-defendants Robert Revis, Anthony Bueno, and an undercover FBI agent to help them manipulate the process for bidding on federal contracts with the VA.

Revis and Bueno, working with Nevins, agreed to submit fraudulent bids from service-disabled-veteran-owned small businesses under contract with their consulting company so that federal contracts would be set aside for only those companies. As Bueno put it, the conspirators would then “own all the dogs on the track.”
Nevins, Bueno and Revis worked to conceal the nature of the bribe payments by either kicking back to Nevins a portion of the payments made to their consulting company, or by asking their consulting company’s clients to pay Nevins for sham training classes related to federal contracting. At one of those sham trainings in Las Vegas, Nevada, Nevins accepted a $4,500 cash bribe from the undercover FBI agent.

After complaining about not being paid by Revis and Bueno for his participation in the scheme, Nevins used his official position at the VA to extort approximately $10,000 from an undercover FBI agent, telling the agent that “the train don’t go without me. You know what I mean? I’m the engine. I’m the caboose. I’m the engine room.” Nevins also told the undercover FBI agent “this is a business and businessmen need to get paid . . . . so I can have my Christmas, you know what I’m saying?”

Anthony Bueno was previously sentenced in this case to 30 months imprisonment. He was also sentenced to 63 months imprisonment for his role in a separately indicted wire fraud scheme in which he used false representations about investment opportunities to take over a million dollars from several victims.

Robert Revis pleaded guilty in April 2019 to an Information charging him with a single count of supplementing the salary of a federal official. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for March 2, 2020.

Source: https://www.justice.gov/usao-co/pr/former-veterans-affairs-official-sentenced-18-months-federal-prison-role-bribery-scheme

January 20, 2020 By cs

Businessman who tried to ‘own every dog on the track’ sentenced for conspiring to bribe VA contract specialist

The Justice Department announced in Denver last week the sentencing of a businessman who engaged in a conspiracy with a Veterans Affairs’ contracting official to manipulate contract awards to benefit a consulting company that purportedly represented service-disabled veteran owned small businesses.

Anthony Bueno was sentenced to serve 30 months in federal prison, followed by 3 years of supervised release, for his role in a conspiracy to bribe a VA official so that clients of his company would gain an unfair advantage in the VA contracting process. Bueno was remanded into custody immediately after the sentencing hearing.

The VA’s contracting official, Dwane Nevins, previously pleaded guilty in September 2019 to every count of an indictment charging him with this scheme, including counts of conspiracy, receiving bribes, extortion, and criminal conflicts of interests. He is scheduled to be sentenced on February 19, 2020.

According to court records:

Bueno and his business partner, Robert Revis, agreed to help an undercover FBI agent, who was posing as a veteran and small business owner, bribe Nevins, a contracting specialist at the VA’s Network Contracting Office in Colorado.
As part of the bribery scheme, Bueno and Revis, working with Nevins, agreed to submit bids from small businesses owned by veterans disabled during military service (one of whom was the undercover FBI agent) under contract with Buenon and Revis’ consulting company so that federal contracts would be set aside for only those companies.
As Bueno explained to the undercover agent, the conspirators would then “own all the dogs on the track,” meaning their clients were guaranteed to get the contracts.
Bueno, Revis and Nevins worked to conceal the nature of the bribe payments by either kicking back to Nevins a portion of the payments made to the consulting company, or by asking the consulting company’s clients to pay Nevins directly for sham training classes related to federal contracting.

Robert Revis pleaded guilty in April 2019 to an Information charging him with a single count of supplementing the salary of a federal official. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for March 2, 2020. Bueno pleaded guilty on September 17, 2019.

Bueno has also pleaded guilty to conspiring to launder money arising from a completely separate wire fraud scheme in which he used false representations about investment opportunities to take over a million dollars from several victims. Sentencing in that case, pending before United States District Judge William J. Martinez, is scheduled for January 23, 2019.

The case was jointly investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General, with substantial assistance from the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Inspector General.

Source: https://www.justice.gov/usao-co/pr/businessman-sentenced-two-and-half-years-imprisonment-conspiring-bribe-veterans-affairs

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has awarded its long-awaited Commercial Cloud Enterprise, or C2E, contract to five companies — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM.

A former government contract officer with the General Services Administration (GSA), was sentenced last week to a 21-month prison term on a federal bribery charge stemming from a scheme in which he accepted bribes from government contractors during a six-year period.

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