posted on Dec, 26 2006 @ 06:53 AM
I see Bechtel is on the list. No surprise there.
The one time I worked with Bechtel, we were given pricing of approx. $700,000. They went over budget in one month on a 4 month project and continued
to rack up hours and expenses without notification, in complete contradiction to our contract.
While auditing the bills and expenses I found numerous instances of double-billing hours and erroneous charges. We were billed for corkscrews, gum,
new laptops and hard drives, passport photos and passports. Part of the contract stipulated that they had housing expenses of $155 per day, which
included their laundry, and meal allowances of $50 per day. It was more like $50 per meal, they expensed us for laundry, and charged us $225 per day
for hotels. To cut expenses, I had rented several apartments for some of them and was most annoyed when I received a bill from the property manager
for towels that were stolen, furniture damaged and long-distance bills that hadn't been paid.
We were also billed for Canadian taxes that weren't applicable and that Bechtel didn't have registered tax numbers for. So glad we paid for that 15
hours they billed us for their tax 'experts' to do the requisite work.
Long story short - A $700,000 job turned into a $1.4 million job within 3 months and it wasn't anywhere near completed. We gave notice that we
wanted to terminate the agreement for non-performance, Bechtel threatened to sue our butts into the ground because that would have made them
ineligible for US government contracts and after $50,000 in lawyers fees, we parted ways 'by mutual agreement' (sorry US taxpayers). Bechtel got
$765,000 from us and we got a incomplete and useless report that wasn't anything close to what they had been paid to produce. Not to mention our
totally screwed up timeline.
I can only imagine what kind of crap they would pull on contracts of this magnitude. :shk:
[edit on 26-12-2006 by Duzey]