Under a government contract, more than 126,000 helmets made at a Texas prison in 2010 were recalled when major defects were discovered by inspectors, according to a report issued Wednesday by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG).
ArmorSource, the company responsible for the faulty gear, was awarded additional government contracts even as the OIG conducted its probe, although taxpayers and the government lost some $19 million on the unsound helmets. The helmets were made as then-President George W. Bush ordered a US military surge in an effort to beat back Al-Qaeda.
The Department of Defense awarded ArmorSource a $30 million contract in 2006, and construction labor was subcontracted to Federal Prisons Industries (FPI), a program within the Bureau of Prisons that employs inmate labor to produce a wide range of products for the federal government. The report’s summary said that a lack oversight lead to a number of problems in the Beaumont, Texas, program, which has since been deactivated.
Officials at FPI "pre-selected" helmets for quality checks that were supposedly random, but the IG report found that staff instructed inmates to doctor documents "to falsely indicate that helmets passed inspection and met contract specifications."
The report indicated that inspectors from the Defense Contract Management Agency, "did not perform proper inspections, lacked training, and submitted false inspection records wherein they attested that [helmet] lots were inspected when in fact they were not…At least in one instance an inspector certified the lots as being inspected over a fax machine."
The OIG also noted that the provisional tools used by inmates posed a security risk, as they could have brought harm to prison guards. But the federal government awarded ArmorSource a two-year contract worth $92 million in 2013, even as the probe was ongoing.
It was announced in January that ArmorSource would deliver 100,000 lightweight helmets to the Marine Corps, and 105,000 to the US Army this year. This announcement came only two months after the company paid out $3 million in a lawsuit over poorly-made helmets brought by two whistleblowers.
Martin Brackett, an attorney for ArmorSource said that FPI is to blame for the defective helmets, and that the Ohio-based company is no longer affiliated with the program.
"The minute they found out about the misconduct at Federal Prison Industries, they severed their ties. This was the first and last contract [with FPI]."
The lawyer added that ArmorSource paid the settlement so the company could move on. "The company had been having to deal with it for years. They reached a point where they decided they simply wanted to pay and be done with it rather than spending that money and to continue the aggravation of the litigation on it."
Justice Department spokeswoman Nicole Navas wouldn’t comment on the Department’s opinion on the continued awarding of contracts to ArmorSource, pointing out that "the decision whether to award a contract lies with the particular contracting agency."
