Wilson ran unsuccessfully for Senate in New Mexico last year. DOE IG flags $450K to Wilson's firm

A company run by former Rep. Heather Wilson collected about $450,000 from four Energy Department facilities even though there’s little evidence the work was actually done, according to a new inspector general report.

Federal regulations require that consulting work is paid out only when supported by evidence of the nature and scope of the services provided.


“In spite of these requirements, we found that the department’s facility contractors failed to include, or did not enforce, terms in the consulting agreements that would have required [Heather Wilson & Co.] to provide details regarding the nature and scope of work performed prior to payment,” DOE Inspector General Gregory Friedman said. “Instead, we discovered that the contractors made payments to [the company] based on invoices that lacked the detail necessary to support that the agreed-to services had been provided.”

The information investigators got from contractor officials at the Los Alamos, N.M., and other DOE labs “did not meet even minimum standards for satisfying” Federal Acquisition Regulation requirements, Friedman said.

The questionable payments include 23 payments from Sandia, N.M., between January 2009 and March 2011 totaling $226,378, 19 payments from Los Alamos between August 2009 and February 2011 totaling $195,718 and $30,000 by the Nevada National Security Site and Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

In a statement Tuesday, Wilson said the report “confirms that the labs were satisfied with my work.” She added that DOE had not contacted her about the payments the IG found questionable.

Wilson ran unsuccessfully against Martin Heinrich to replace retiring New Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman last year and was appointed to the Congressional Advisory Panel on the Governance of the Nuclear Security Enterprise by House Speaker John Boehner.

DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration requested the IG’s review, and DOE says it has already recovered $442,877 paid to Wilson’s firm.