Until last year, the new chief executive of the NFL Players Association, Lloyd Howell, was Booz Allen Hamilton’s chief financial officer. The company recently cleaned up a huge financial mess.
According to the Washington Post, Booz Allen has agreed to pay $377 million to settle a long-running federal government lawsuit over alleged overbilling by the company. 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 prosecute even the largest corporations and most complex matters alleging the theft of taxpayer dollars,” U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew M. Graves said in a statement released Friday.
The Post explains that a criminal investigation into the situation was dropped in 2021. The Securities and Exchange Commission continues to investigate the situation as Booz Allen is a public company.
The case began when Sarah Feinberg, a former Booz Allen employee, resigned in August 2016 “after supervisors disregarded or downplayed her warnings about compliance risks and failed to support her drive for change.” She then became a whistleblower.
According to the Post, in 2015 she was “deployed to the work of chief financial officer and assigned to a team of three responsible for improving the company’s accounting.”
Howell became chief financial officer on July 1, 2016, about a month before Feinberg’s resignation.
It is unclear whether the NFLPA was aware of this situation when assessing Howell. On the other hand, everything about Howell’s prosecution and hiring is unclear because the union insisted on an irrational and extreme level of secrecy. The players who voted for Howell to be the new CEO only found out about his candidacy during the week of the vote. The other candidates for the post are still unknown to ordinary members of the union.
While there is no specific allegation of wrongdoing on Howell’s part, his title and the overall circumstances make the matter a matter of curiosity and due diligence. Did the player reps who voted on Howell know about a controversy that overlapped with his tenure as CFO? Did the NFLPA Executive Committee, which appears to have personally selected Howell for the job and may have rigged his election, withhold the information from the player representatives who voted?
Or didn’t the board of directors know either?
Although Booz Allen denies wrongdoing as part of the settlement, the company is paying $377 million to settle an allegation that it defrauded the federal government. If the union leadership didn’t know about it, that would be a problem. If the union leadership knew about it and didn’t tell the voting player representatives, that would be a problem.
Another problem is that the union’s rank and file will probably never know whether the leadership was aware of the Booz Allen controversy because of their cocky view that strict confidentiality equals good governance.