There doesn’t seem to be much chatter now on a concern that contractors raised vocally in September about the manner in which the Energy Department doles out payments for work being performed within its nuclear cleanup complex.
The problem of DOE contract payments being distributed in small monthly increments, and sometimes creating cash flow problems, seems to have gone away – at least as far as a couple industry officials can tell. The sources, who talked to Weapons Complex Monitor before and after the Thanksgiving holiday, said they no longer hear much about the problem.
“I think they got it fixed is why you haven’t heard anything about it lately,” one veteran industry source said Thursday.
Another industry source said before Thanksgiving that his company only had one operation that was truly affected by the situation and it secured enough funding to keep going through early December.
The issue was referenced, although not thoroughly explained, in September by speakers at DOE’s National Cleanup Workshop in Alexandria, Va.
“[I]n the past four months something seems to have broken somewhere, because all of a sudden two or three of our sites have been running out of money at the end of each month,” Fluor Senior Vice President Greg Meyer said during one panel discussion. “It’s different than encountering such a situation at the end of a quarter or the end of a year.”
At the time, the Energy Facility Contractors Group (EFCOG) was said to be communicating with DOE on the matter. The organization and DOE did not respond this week to requests for comment.
The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management receives more than $6 billion each year, much of which is paid out to Fluor, Bechtel, BWX Technologies, CH2M, AECOM, and other nuclear cleanup primes – which then pay out funds to subcontractors for certain operations at projects stretching from Washington state to upstate New York.
During the Cleanup Workshop, Ralph Holland, deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and project management for EM, said the department had been on a 30-day allotment cycle for about half a year.
“That’s a challenge, and compounding that challenge there was a new accounting system, appropriations systems … the system that doles out the money, was installed earlier this year,” Holland said at the time. “Ironically, that system we learned just recently, was designed to prevent us from becoming anti-deficient, but it’s been a challenge, the implementation hasn’t gone well. So, we’re doing 30-day increments and it’s taken 15-20 days to get the money out, and that’s what’s running us so close in so many cases.”
