California has plans for emergency repairs. After the Northridge Earthquake major damage was done to several interstate bridges. Select contractors with excellent resumes, job experience, were selected to remove and replace these bridges - within 30 days with a large bonus for each day completed ahead of schedule and an equally huge penalty for each day late, including permits. Everyone works together and some were completed in 17 days. All were completed on time.
Tales from the front ... The day of the Northridge Earthquake, Caltrans' field construction managers were directed to call any contractor who had done satisfactory State projects and send them out to dig people out of the rubble Right Now. And we'll have the auditors come down from HQ later and figure out if they billed us appropriately. For the contractors with lots of experience on Caltrans jobs, no billing problems were found.
I spent several months in SoCal verifying that timecards, equipment rental, etc and CT field diaries for the earthquake emergency response supported the contractors claims. I didn't find variances from the experienced contractors.
One variance I'll never forget! I walked into a sub-contractors office and the receptionist was a stunningly gorgeous teenager. An hour later when they had given me junk records that didn't support their claimed costs, Ms Hottie came in alone, swung the door closed, sat on the desktop a little too close, and leaned in to point at various figures on the documents I was looking at. It was a too-obvious attempt to get my attention away from the records - hanging in the air unsaid was 'You can touch me if you like!' It was clear she was directed to do this and was having fun doing it. My first thought was this is the first step of an attempted bribe, my only instance in 20 years.
Ok, game over. I wrote up what I had seen so far and told them this was going to take another day onsite to complete. Next day the owner was upfront when I confronted him with the variance between claimed/supported costs. He said he had never done a State job before and thought he could bill whatever he could imagine and no one would notice. Sorry, no, preventing that is exactly why we do post-completion cost audits. You show us paychecks you paid but your bank statement shows they were never cashed? Sorry, that's fraud.
We took away $50k from the prime contractor who would have been obligated to pass payment through to this subcontractor and that was the end of it, no protest. The prime said he got that guy's name off one of our lists of persons interested in bidding State work, that's all he knew about him and he had no problem with refusing payment to the sub based on our finding.
Your Tax Dollars At Work.
