VA | The Contracting Education Academy

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

December 19, 2019 By cs

15 individuals charged for roles in fraud and bribery scheme at 2 South Florida VA hospitals

Fifteen South Florida residents have been charged by federal authorities in connection with a kickback and bribery scheme involving employees and vendors of U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Centers located in West Palm Beach and Miami, Florida.

Court filings allege that in exchange for cash bribes and kickback payments, medical center employees, using government credit cards, ordered medical and other hospital supplies through corrupt vendors. In some cases, the prices of the supplies were grossly inflated, while in other cases the orders were only partially fulfilled or not fulfilled at all.

West Palm Beach VA employees Clinton Purvis, 52, of West Palm Beach, Christopher Young, 44, of West Palm Beach, and Kenneth Scott, 59, of Riviera Beach, as well as former West Palm Beach VA employee Robert “Bob” Johnson, 62, of West Palm Beach, were charged in a single indictment with offenses that include conspiracy to commit health care fraud, substantive counts of health care fraud, and bribery. Miami VA Medical Center employees Waymon Melvon Woods, 58, of Miami, Don Anderson, 59, of Port St. Lucie, Jose Eugenio Cuervo, 53, of Miramar, Donnie Shatek Hawes, 35, of Cutler Bay, and Robert Lee James Harris, 44, of Miami Gardens, as well as former employee Eugene Campbell, 60, of Miami Gardens, were each charged in separate indictments with bribery offenses. VA supply vendors Jorge Flores, 45, of Delray Beach, Earron Starks, 49, of Hallandale Beach, Carlicha Starks, 40, of Hallandale Beach, and Robert Kozak, 73, of Boca Raton, have been charged in criminal informations with conspiracy to commit health care fraud. Separately, Lisa M. Anderson, 48, of Delray Beach, has been charged with making false statements in connection with an application filed with the VA to have one of the vendor companies falsely designated as a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business.

According to the facts alleged in the indictments and criminal informations:

The charged employees worked in logistics departments of the West Palm Beach and the Miami VA Medical Centers and were responsible for ensuring that medical and other hospital supplies were purchased and received.
It is alleged that at the West Palm Beach VA, Purvis, Johnson, and Scott would place orders for supplies with the complicit vendors that were either fictitious or contained inflated quantities. The vendors would then invoice the VA for the fictitious or inflated orders.
Purvis, Johnson, and Scott would authorize the payment of VA funds to the vendors, who would then kick-back a portion of the proceeds to Purvis, Johnson, and Scott.
Purvis and Johnson paid a portion of those proceeds to Young, in exchange for his agreement to falsely enter the supplies as having been received in the VA computer system.
At the Miami VA Medical Center, Campbell, Woods, Anderson, Cuervo, Hawes, and Harris each accepted cash bribe payments in exchange for placing orders for supplies with Flores’ and Earron and Claricha Starks’ companies.
As a result of these schemes, the defendants caused the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to pay millions of dollars for inflated or unfulfilled purchase orders.

Indictments and criminal informations are charging instruments containing allegations. A defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

Source: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdfl/pr/fifteen-individuals-charged-roles-fraud-and-bribery-scheme-two-south-florida-va

December 16, 2019 By cs

Is government’s disability procurement program eroding?

The AbilityOne Commission faces compliance and resource challenges heading into the new year, according to its inspector general.

The federal organization responsible for ensuring that government agencies acquire goods and services from contractors that employ blind and other significantly disabled workers is in a tight spot, the AbilityOne Commission’s Inspector General found in a Dec. 2 report noting several management challenges that threaten the program’s stability.

The AbilityOne program, which has existed in some fashion since 1938, requires government agencies to make sure that a certain amount of their purchases come from contractors that fulfill the requirements for blind and disabled employees. But other procurement programs with conflicting priorities and a lack of sufficient resources mean that the program has experienced an “erosion” of its statutory authority.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/acquisition/2019/12/03/is-governments-disability-procurement-program-eroding-away

March 22, 2019 By AMK

Why contracting challenges put VA on the ‘High-Risk’ list

The Department of Veterans Affairs has not updated some of its purchasing regulations since 2008, and the resulting problems created for contracting officers at the agency have caused the Government Accountability Office to designate the problem a high-risk area for 2019.

“The VA acquisition is a huge part of the mission over at the Department of Veterans Affairs. They do about $26 billion in procurements each year, and tens of thousands of procurement actions. Since 2015, we’ve had over 31 recommendations that we’ve done there and, unfortunately, 21 of those remain open, and so the high-risk designation centers on a couple of longstanding weaknesses that they’ve had in the acquisition area,” said Chris Mihm, managing director of the GAO Strategic Issues Team, in an agency podcast.

“First is that they don’t have a consistent and coordinated set of policies and regulations across the department. Second is that there is the importance of just a human capital, to make sure that their people are trained, to make sure that their workloads are being appropriately managed. Third, there’s problems that we’ve seen in terms of data and transparency over the acquisition process. And then fourth, that we’re very concerned about the absence of a strategic approach to procurement at the department.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/management/2019/03/07/why-contracting-challenges-put-va-on-the-high-risk-list/

March 18, 2019 By AMK

VA procurement and security clearance processing land on GAO’s high-risk list

The Veterans Affairs Department suffers from “fundamental management weaknesses and is one of the most challenged in the federal government,” Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told a Senate panel recently.

Leadership instability, high-level vacancies and a lack of accountability are all problems at the sprawling, decentralized VA, which appears three times on the newly released biennial list of high-risk programs compiled by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

VA Secretary Robert Wilkie “has a plan but there’s not a lot of detail” for implementing GAO recommendations in such areas as the department’s outdated procurement system that relies too heavily on expensive emergency procurements, Dodaro said.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.govexec.com/management/2019/03/va-procurement-and-security-clearance-processing-land-gaos-high-risk-list/155354

Fifteen South Florida residents have been charged by federal authorities in connection with a kickback and bribery scheme involving employees and vendors of U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Centers located in West Palm Beach and Miami, Florida.

The AbilityOne Commission faces compliance and resource challenges heading into the new year, according to its inspector general.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has not updated some of its purchasing regulations since 2008, and the resulting problems created for contracting officers at the agency have caused the Government Accountability Office to designate the problem a high-risk area for 2019.

The Veterans Affairs Department suffers from “fundamental management weaknesses and is one of the most challenged in the federal government,” Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told a Senate panel recently.

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