Contractors hired to decontaminate postal facilities for anthrax last fall billed the government for at least $90 million in unexplained cost overruns and mail irradiation machines that have yet to be used, DIRECT Newsline has learned.
One company got $600,000 for work it never did, while another $1 million went into preparing decontamination facilities that never were used, according to the Hartford Courant newspaper.
The findings by the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General come as postal officials are asking Congress for nearly $700 million in emergency funding to help cover costs incurred during the anthrax attacks.
The Postal Service’s inspector general spent five months examining 11 contracts, totaling $104 million, awarded last fall at the peak of the anthrax crisis. The inspector general pointed out that the Postal Service was under intense pressure to protect its workers after two died of inhalation anthrax, and to assure everyone the mail was safe, the newspaper reported.
“We had no way of knowing last fall how much this equipment would cost or how we would end up having to use it and we had to act very quickly,” said USPS spokesman Jerry Kreienkamp. “Nobody has ever had to clean up a postal facility like this before.”
But the Inspector General’s report, released last March, concluded that the Postal Service was unduly hasty, saying “contracts and delivery orders were awarded using deviated purchasing procedures [that] exposed the Postal Service to increased financial risk.”
“The Postal Service’s response to the initial threat of anthrax and its continuing efforts are commendable,” Assistant Inspector General Ronald K. Stith, said in a statement. “However, our reviews identified four areas that warranted management’s attention. These areas were contracting, transportation, contractor oversight and mail delivery.”
Kreienkamp noted that the USPS is currently in the process of renegotiating the contracts it made last fall with the makers of the irradiation equipment.
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