Snowden case not the first embarrassment for Booz Allen, or D.C. contracting industry

By Tom Hamburger and Robert O’Harrow Jr., Published: July 8

When allegations of improper contracting behavior hit Booz Allen Hamilton, the national security consulting firm in McLean bounced back stronger than ever.

In 2008, a Booz Allen employee at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida was granted the highest-level “top secret” security clearance even though he had been convicted a few months earlier of lying to government officials in order to sneak a South African woman he had met on the Internet into the country.

Last year, the Air Force temporarily suspended the San Antonio division of the company from future contracts because it had obtained and distributed confidential Pentagon bidding data for its own competitive advantage. In 2006, the Justice Department said the company overbilled travel ex­penses, and the agency initially recommended that Booz Allen be barred from federal contracting.

Those incidents had little or no impact on Booz Allen’s success in recent years or on its ability to compete for federal contracts, which last year provided 99 percent of the company’s $5.8 billion in revenue....




Full article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/snowden-case-not-the-first-embarassment-for-booz-allen--or-washingtons-burgeoning-contracting-industry/2013/07/08/30440b0a-d9b3-11e2-a9f2-42ee3912ae0e_story.html