November 21, 2012 - The Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee called the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) a poster child for corruption, and called for significant steps to improve the Authority’s management of D.C. area transportation systems.

Chairman John L. Mica conducted a hearing on the Department of Transportation Inspector General’s (DOT IG) recent audit highlighting problems with MWAA management policies, practices and programs.

“This is a sad chapter for Metropolitan Washington and advocates for good D.C. transportation,” Mica said. “Information uncovered by the Inspector General revealed that MWAA has become a poster child for corrupt practices.
“The IG found problems with hiring practices, a lack of competition for contracts, and ethical violations,” Mica continued. “For example, the Inspector General report highlighted cases where contractors provided MWAA employees with trips to golf tournaments, tickets to other sporting events and concerts, and tickets for the Super Bowl, travel and accommodations amounting to nearly $5,000. MWAA senior officials were improperly filling vacancies, awarding excessive salaries, and providing unjustified hiring bonuses. MWAA also gave preferential treatment to friends and relatives of Board members.”

Mica also cited a news report that MWAA employees had been sounding alarms years before the DOT IG investigation. According to the Washington Examiner, comments from an employee survey in 2010 urged changes to the culture of management at MWAA by eliminating the “corruption,” “favoritism,” “nepotism,” etc.

Washington, D.C.’s congressional delegate said Tuesday that she will introduce a bill requiring the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority to follow federal auditing regulations.

D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton’s bill came after an Inspector General’s Office report released last week found major flaws in the processes the MWAA uses to audit its internal operations.

Many of the chief concerns in the report centered around the MWAA audit office’s inability to adequately support its reports with source documents, and the office’s inability to comply with widely accepted industry standards. The MWAA provided work papers to the inspector general that did not identify the sources, and in particular, the Office of Audit’s work papers did not clearly support 19 of 30 facts and figures in 4 of 5 of the reports reviewed.

“Unfortunately, this latest report showcasing the chronic failures at MWAA is not breaking news,” Norton said in a statement. “For years, similar reports have warned that MWAA’s contracting and other financial processes lack meaningful oversight from its Office of Audit, which is in desperate need of reform.”

The MWAA Office of Audit also had severe issues in the day-to-day interactions between supervisors and staff. It has no process for issuing formal audit policies and procedures, with most coming verbally from the Vice President of Audit, or limited written policies “that are not signed or dated,” according to the report.

In the report the vice president of audit office said staff is required to complete 40 hours of training annually, and that she “mentally tracks” the completion of this training. However, documents provided to the Inspector General showed that “three of the four staff, including the Vice President of Audit, did not obtain 40 hours of continuing professional development annually between 2011 and 2013.”

A similar investigation of the MWAA in 2012 found that the organization is consumed by a “culture of favoritism,” in which senior staff at the MWAA selected contractors based on who they liked best. Almost two-thirds of contracts approved by the MWAA worth more than $200,000 were awarded without proper competition, and one contract went to a bidder even though they charged 234 percent more than other bidders.

WASHINGTON — A whistleblower lawsuit was filed more than a year before the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and contractor Capital Rail Constructors say they learned that defective concrete panels were installed at five new Silver Line stations.

Virginia and the federal government are joining the False Claims Act and Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act lawsuit, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia said Wednesday afternoon.

The suit was filed under seal in March 2016 by Nathan Davidheiser, who worked for Universal Concrete Products, the subcontractor that produced the faulty concrete panels. Davidheiser said he was directed by his employer to lie about quality control tests.

The Airports Authority and the main construction contractor, Capital Rail Constructors, reiterated to the authority board Wednesday though that they only recognized problems with the concrete panels in the first part of 2017 — a year after the lawsuit was filed.