Monday, October 23, 2017

What politician's brother-in-law is this?

On Sept. 5, Gibbco LLC got a $74 million award to build mobile homes for Hurricane Harvey victims. Gibbco’s only public presence is a GoDaddy website, which lists neither a phone number, an email address, nor information about who runs the company. According to a contract database run by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Gibbco has five employees and annual revenue of $200,000; the address listed as its headquarters belongs to a house in a residential neighborhood in Longwood, Fla.

[...]

One way to speed things up [for hurricane relief] is to bypass the usual competitive bidding process. In the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, FEMA awarded $178 million in noncompete contracts, more than twice as much as the year before.

[...]

One risk is that contractors with questionable track records get taxpayer money again. Since Harvey, FEMA has awarded $215 million to a company called Composite Analysis Group Inc. to provide bottled water. According to a federal contractor database, Composite Analysis is also called Lipsey Mountain Spring Water Inc., which got $81 million in 2005 for services that included providing bottled water to areas hit by Hurricane Katrina. Lipsey missed at least 9 of 14 deadlines, failed to document its orders properly, submitted “improper or inaccurate documentation,” and was paid $881,000 in unsupported costs, the U.S. Department of Defense’s inspector general later concluded.

[...]

On Oct. 2, FEMA awarded $1.6 million to Inner Parish Security Corp. The U.S. Department of Labor found that Inner Parish committed hundreds of federal wage and labor violations dating back to at least 2002, according to records reviewed by Bloomberg, some on FEMA contracts.

  Bloomberg

And Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands still don't have power.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Here's another one, even more obvious:  A company with only two employees landed the contract to repair a large sector of Puerto Rico's electrical grid.  Funnily enough, the company is from Interior Secretary Zinke's home town of Whitefish, Montana.

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