ATLANTA (CN) - Lockheed Martin will not have to face claims that it overbilled the United States by using a flawed system to track hours on government projects, a federal judge ruled.
Two former employees sued Lockheed Martin alleging that the company retaliated against them after they reported a flaw in its labor-tracking system that they said led to overpayments from the government.
Mark Wood, one of the whistle-blowers, became the medical director of Lockheed's Marietta, Ga., site in 2002, after working as a senior occupational staff physician at the company for 12 years. While tracking methods to reduce the effect of lost time on employment costs, Wood and his co-plaintiff Kathy Isley discovered that employees were allowed to submit an unlimited amount of hours under the Family Medical and Leave Act hours, even though regulations cap FMLA leave time at 12 weeks annually, according to the complaint.
Lockheed's finance department next had Wood and Isley review the company's clock-in system used by hourly employees to track hours worked on each project. There the plaintiffs claimed to have discovered a flaw in Lockheed's labor-recording system that did not distinguish between actual worked hours and lost time, such as vacation or leave hours.
They claimed that the system spread the "lost time" across all of Lockheed's government contracts, allowing the company to falsely bill the government based on its reports, and to overstaff government projects. What's more, Wood and Isley claimed that many employees billed for overtime despite having worked fewer than 40 hours in a week, which resulted in millions of dollars in overpayments from the government.
Read more here: http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/03/21/55943.htm
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