The Civilian Board of Contract Appeals has ordered the Energy Department to pay an additional $33.2 million to the former prime cleanup contractor for the Idaho Site.
The board said CH2M-WG Idaho is entitled to recover more than $27.3 million in incentive fees for work it did on the Idaho Cleanup Project. In addition, the board said that DOE owed the contractor more than $5.9 million under a safety fee program and interest payments dating back to March 2014.
The board, however, rejected the CH2M request an additional $7.9 million in “cost transfers” associated with the Idaho Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU). The facility is intended to process 900,000 gallons of liquid sodium-bearing waste produced during Cold War-era spent fuel reprocessing at the Idaho National Laboratory, but has not yet started operations.
At the heart of the contract interpretation dispute was a cost-plus-incentive-fee (CPIF) deal that enabled the contractor team to negotiate some extra work on a “fixed fee” basis. Not long after starting work, CH2M-WG Idaho reallocated some general and administrative (G&A) costs under the cost-plus-incentive provision into the fixed fee part of the contract. The end result allowed the contractor to earn greater fees than DOE had anticipated.
“We conclude that DOE, at its own peril, waited too long to resolve the G&A allocation issue with CWI, both because it was not an issue DOE was contractually allowed to address unilaterally, and because, by the time DOE decided to address the issue, CWI’s position on an equitable adjustment for the G&A allocation issue had changed,” the board said in its Sept. 7 decision.
It is unknown if DOE will appeal.
Fluor in February 2016 was awarded the current Idaho Cleanup Contract, worth $1.4 billion.
