The former company of the new CEO is paying the NFLPA $ 377 million settlement to the US government

Until last year, new NFL executive director Lloyd Howell served as chief financial officer for Booz Allen Hamilton. The company recently cleaned up a massive financial mess.

for every Washington PostBooz Allen has agreed to pay $377 million to settle a long-running lawsuit from the federal government alleging the company overcharged it. The lawsuit alleged that Booz Allen inflated its bills to cover losses in other areas of its business.

“This settlement, which is one of the largest procurement fraud settlements in history, shows that the United States will go after even the largest and most complex companies where taxpayer money was allegedly stolen,” US Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew M. Graves said in a statement Friday.

the mail He explains that a criminal investigation into the situation has been closed in 2021. The SEC continues to explore the situation, since Booz Allen is a publicly traded company.

The case began when Sarah Feinberg, a former Booz Allen employee, resigned in August 2016 “after supervisors ignored or downplayed her warnings about compliance risks and did not support her in order to make changes.” Then I became a whistleblower.

According to the mailShe was assigned in 2015 to “work for the Chief Financial Officer and assigned to a three-person team responsible for improving the company’s accounting.”

Howell became CFO on July 1, 2016, about a month before Feinberg resigned.

It is unclear if the NFLPA was aware of this situation when evaluating Howell. Then again, everything about Howell’s hunt and hiring is unclear, because the syndicate insisted on an irrational and extreme degree of secrecy. The players who voted for Howell to become the new CEO were unaware of his nomination until the week of the vote. To this day, the other job candidates are not known by the rank and file members of the guild.

Although there is no specific allegation of wrongdoing by Howell, his surname and the general circumstances make it an object of curiosity and occasion for proper care. Did the player representatives who voted Howell know anything about the controversy that had interfered with his tenure as CFO? Did the NFLPA Executive Committee, which by all appearances selected Howell for the position and engineered his election, withhold information from the player representatives who voted?

Or does the Executive Committee also not know?

Although Booz Allen denies any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, it is paying $377 million to settle an allegation that it deceived the federal government. If the union leadership is not aware of this, it is a problem. If the guild leadership knew about it and didn’t disclose it to the representatives of the players who voted, that was a problem.

The fact that rank-and-file members of the union will never know if the leadership is aware of the Booz Allen controversy due to the tendentious view that strict secrecy equals good governance is also problematic.