Wrist Slap for CEO Who Defrauded USAID out of Hundreds of Millions

Wrist Slap for CEO Who Defrauded USAID out of Hundreds of Millions

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By Brianna Ehley, The Fiscal Times

Former CEO Derish Wolff of Louis Berger Group, one of the country’s largest engineer contracting firms will be confined to his home for a year and have to pay a $4.5 million fine for helping to defraud the federal government out of hundreds of millions of dollars over 20 years. The fine represents a tiny fraction of the amount the company collected from the government. 

Wolff, 70, was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Anne Thompson for leading a “conspiracy to defraud USAID by billing the agency on so-called ‘cost-reimbursable’ contracts—including hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts for reconstructive work in Iraq and Afghanistan” and for inflating overhead costs. 

Related: U.S. Blew $500k on Melting Afghan Buildings 

Federal prosecutors said the company, tasked with building roads and bridges in Afghanistan and Iraq, charged the government 140 percent of the actual cost for every project it did. That means that for every one dollar of work the contractor did, it received $1.40 extra. Louis Berger was paid more than $2 billon by the U.S. government for its infrastructure work in war zones. 

Prosecutors said that between 1990 and 2009, Wolff and his colleagues inflated the costs of their work for USAID by telling accountants to “pad time sheets with hours ostensibly devoted to federal government projects when it had not actually worked on such projects.” 

Related: Pentagon Won’t Verify $300 Million a Year in Afghanistan is Spent Properly

Beyond logging false work hours, the prosecutor said Wolff routinely instructed his subordinates to bill USAID for all of their overhead expenses—like rent at Louis Berger’s Washington office even though the D.C. office worked on other projects that had nothing to do with the federal government.

After two other company executives pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the federal government in 2010, Louis Berger Group agreed to make full restitution to USAID. It settled civil and criminal charges and had to pay $18.7 million in criminal fines and an additional $50.6 million to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by significantly overbilling USAID.

6 Traits of an Emerging Millionaire: Are You One?

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By Jacqueline Leo

It’s not just Wall Street bankers, hedge fund traders and corporate raiders who will join the one percent.    Nope.  By now you may have heard that the new look of affluence in America is kind of… girly. The 7th Fidelity Millionaire Outlook found that today’s emerging high rollers are 66 percent female and 25 percent non-white. 

The Fidelity Outlook identified 6 wealth-building traits that multi-millionaires have in common: Their starting point—a mere $250,000 in assets. 

Related: Americans Are About to Get a Nice Fat Pay Raise

1   Time Horizon: On average, emerging affluent investors are just 40 years of age with 27 years left before they reach the normal retirement age of 67. Only one percent of the emerging affluent is retired.

2.   Career: Many of the emerging affluent have pursued similar professions to today’s millionaires, including information technology, finance and accounting. While they might be at lower-level positions than millionaires, they have a number of years in front of them to move up the ladder.

3.   Income: At $125,000, the median annual household income for the emerging affluent is 2.5X the median U.S. household income8 and is nearing the income of today’s millionaires ($200,000 for those still employed). 

Related: The 10 Best States for Taxes in 2015​​​ 

4.   Self-Made Status: Approximately eight in 10 emerging affluent investors have earned or increased their assets on their own, a trait they share with millionaires and deca-millionaires.

5.   Long-Term Focus: The emerging affluent share millionaires’ long-term focus, with three in four of both groups focused on the long-term growth of their assets, and three in 10 focused on supporting the lifestyle they want in retirement.

6.   Investing Style: Similar to deca-millionaires, the emerging affluent display a willingness to invest aggressively to help maximize returns, as well as a willingness to set aside a significant portion of their portfolio for riskier investments that promise a bigger payoff. The emerging affluent and deca-millionaires were also most likely to describe themselves as “self-directed” investors, seeking hands-on involvement with their investments.

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Why Hard Science and Medicine Is Getting Mushy

<strong>Percent Growth:</strong> 36.4%<br/><strong>No. Jobs Added:</strong> 36.4k<br/><strong>Typical Education Needed:</strong>Doctoral or professional degree<br/><br/><em>Source: <a href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecopro.pdf" target="_blank">B
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By Jacqueline Leo

Arthur Caplan, one of America’s top medical ethicists, is worried about pollution. Not the kind that ruins our oceans or makes it hard for us to breathe, but the kind that poses a threat to the “trustworthiness, utility, and value of science and medicine.”

Caplan, who directs the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center, wrote a blistering essay in last week’s Mayo Clinic Proceedings, saying, "The pollution of science and medicine by plagiarism, fraud, and predatory publishing is corroding the reliability of research. Yet neither the leadership nor those who rely on the truth of science and medicine are sounding the alarm loudly or moving to fix the problem with appropriate energy."

He goes on to cite three causes of publication pollution, which can undermine these areas of “hard science” that should be sacrosanct.

  • The proliferation of journals that recruit authors who pay to get their articles published. Despite having substandard or no peer view, these "predatory publishers" now comprise an estimated 25 percent of all open-access journals. "Not only do they provide opportunities for the unscrupulous in academia and industry to pad their curriculum vitaes and bibliographies with bogus articles and editorial appointments, they also make it difficult for those involved in the assessment and promotion of scholars to discern value from junk," writes Dr. Caplan.
  • Research misconduct, like falsifying or fabricating data or concealing serious violations. Fourteen percent of scientists report that their colleagues falsify data, and 72 percent report other questionable practices, according to one 2009 study published in PLoS One.
  • Plagiarism, which, according to a 2010 Nature article was "staggering," requiring editors to spend "inordinate amounts of time" checking submissions they receive.

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TSA Made $674,841 from Travelers’ Loose Change Last Year

REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni
By Yuval Rosenberg

That loose change in your pocket really adds up…for the government: The Transportation Security Administration collected $674,841.06 in quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies left behind by busy travelers at airport security in fiscal 2014.

In 2005, Congress allowed the TSA to put unclaimed money toward its security operations. The agency says it “makes every effort to reunite passengers with items left behind at the checkpoint, however there are instances where loose change or other items are left behind and unclaimed.” That money is turned into the TSA’s financial office.

Related: 10 Outrageous Items Confiscated by the TSA in 2014

The amount collected has been climbing each year since 2010. The 2014 total is almost $37,000 more than the agency collected the previous year and nearly $300,000 more than was left behind in 2008. In all, over the past seven years travelers have gifted the TSA $3,557,538.39.

Yes, that’s $3.5 million in spare change the agency has added to its coffers courtesy of harried travelers.

Maybe the yearly total have been climbing because travelers are increasingly engrossed with their smartphones, or maybe it’s a sign that the economy has perked up a bit so they no longer care to scoop up those nickels and dimes. Maybe it’s just that getting through a TSA checkpoint is such a hassle that travelers are willing to donate a few coins to be done with the process several seconds sooner.

Whatever the reason, here are the 20 airports where travelers left behind the most spare change in 2014:

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Baseball in 2015: Record High Revenues

A man speaks with a job recruiter at the Nassau County Mega Job Fair at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, New York October 7, 2014.  REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
By Andrew Lumby

e 2015 Major League Baseball season gets underway on Monday with the sport dealing with an aging, shrinking television audience—yet league revenues, franchise valuations and player salaries are all rising faster than the stock market.

With the average MLB team now worth more than $1.2 billion and the average salary breaking $4 million, let's take a look at how the business of baseball has changed in the last few years.

A shrinking, aging television audience

"The five most-watched World Series aired in the five-year period between 1978 and 1982," said Brad Adgate of Horizon Media. All five averaged more than 38 million viewers. Contrast that with the 2014 World Series audience—a skinny 13.8 million—down 64 percent despite an increased U.S. population. Media buyer Adgate said that's "unlike the Super Bowl, which has set an audience record in five of the last six years."

Related: Madison Bumgarner: Exhibit A in Baseball’s Screwball Salary System

Not only is the audience declining, but it's aging too: Last year's World Series had a viewer with a median age of 55.6—a new high. Just five years prior, it had been sub-50 at 49.9, and was in the 44-46 range during the early 1990s.

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