New NFLPA executive director's former firm pays $377 million settlement to U.S. government
Until last year, new NFL Players Association executive director Lloyd Howell served as Chief Financial Officer of Booz Allen Hamilton. The firm recently cleaned up a massive financial mess.
Per the Washington Post, Booz Allen has agreed to pay $377 million to settle a longstanding lawsuit from the federal government that alleged overcharging by the firm. The litigation contended that Booz Allen inflated its invoices to cover losses in other areas of its business.
“This settlement, which is one of the largest procurement fraud settlements in history, demonstrates that the United States will pursue even the largest companies and the most complex matters where taxpayer funds are alleged to have been pilfered,” U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew M. Graves said in a statement issued on Friday.
The Post explains that a criminal investigation of the situation was closed in 2021. The Securities and Exchange Commission continues to explore the situation, since Booz Allen is a publicly-traded company.
The case started when Sarah Feinberg, a former employee of Booz Allen, resigned in August 2016 "after supervisors disregarded or played down her warnings of compliance risks and did not support her push for changes." She then became a whistleblower.
According to the Post, she was assigned in 2015 "to work for the chief financial officer and was assigned to a three-person team responsible for improving the company’s accounting."
Howell became the Chief Financial Officer on July 1, 2016, roughly a month before Feinberg resigned.
It's unclear whether the NFLPA was aware of this situation when evaluating Howell. Then again, everything about the pursuit and hire of Howell is unclear, because the union insisted on an irrational and extreme degree of secrecy. The players who voted on Howell to become the new executive director weren't even aware of his candidacy until the week of the vote. To this day, the other candidates for the job are not known by the rank-and-file members of the union.
While there's no specific claim of wrongdoing by Howell, his title and the overall circumstances make the matter a subject of curiosity and an occasion for proper diligence. Did the player representatives who voted on Howell know anything about a controversy that overlapped with his tenure as CFO? Did the NFLPA Executive Committee, which by all appearances hand picked Howell for the job and arguably engineered his election, conceal the information from the player representatives who voted?
Or did the Executive Committee also not know?
Although Booz Allen denies wrongdoing as part of the settlement, it is paying $377 million to settle a claim that it cheated the federal government. If union leadership didn't know about this, it's a problem. If union leadership knew about it and didn't disclose it to the player representatives who voted, it's a problem.
The fact that the rank-and-file members of the union will likely never know whether leadership was aware of the Booz Allen controversy because of a cockeyed view that strict confidentiality equates to good governance is a problem, too.
