By Isolde Raftery, msnbc.com
Jack Hayes, the director of the National Weather Service, stepped down Friday in response to an investigation that top officials at the weather service had misappropriated $43.8 million by giving bonuses and extensions to contractors without proper justification.
The Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA, released the report on May 18, detailing an audit of nine contracts that include incentive pay for good work. The contracts have a maximum potential value of $1.6 billion.
The investigators said there may be other contracts that provide additional awards from 2008, 2009 and 2010 but that NOAA was unable to “provide a complete and reliable list when requested by the Office of Inspector General.”
Sen. Olympia Snowe, the ranking member of Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard subcommittee, released a statement Friday, the same day Hayes that stepped down and a week after the report had been released.
“The deeply troubling revelation that senior staff at the National Weather Service, which provides indispensable storm and weather forecasting, have been conducting improper and potentially illegal transfers of taxpayers’ money is unacceptable,” Snowe said.
“I am further alarmed that the investigative report raises fundamental concerns that the core operations of the National Weather Service are underfunded, and that the current process in the Department of Commerce is broken, as it ‘did not encourage questioning or provide independent channels for reporting dubious budget decisions,’” Snowe stated.
Snowe states that the investigation, which took place last May and this February, arose from anonymous complaints about the misappropriation of money in 2010 and 2011.
NOAA officials could not, for example, provide written explanation for why they paid $303,000 in awards on a $10 million contract to upgrade personnel and equipment for a satellite operations control center, the report says.
An $80 million contract for the National Weather Service’s river, flood and drought forecasting specified that the contract had to be evaluated annually. But the board assigned to evaluate the contract never met, the report says, nor had a chairperson been assigned.
Even so, auditors found that the contract was renewed five times to the tune of $40 million.
Of the nine contractors, NOAA gave eight high ratings, which allowed contractors to reap the “substantial award fees,” the report says. As a result, auditors concluded that NOAA’s pay system “provided little incentive for contractors to excel in executing their contracts.”
Snowe stated there is no evidence that anyone profited from these transactions.
She also said that after the report was released, NOAA asked for $26 million for the Local Warnings and Forecasts base budget and for $9 million to upgrade a network of radar stations. She said she would urge senators to not consider the 2013 funding bill “until Congress can review (NOAA’s) reprogramming request.”
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