A settlement has been reached in a whistleblower class action lawsuit brought against PAE Government Services Inc (PAE) and RM Asia (HK) Limited (RM Asia). They are accused of violating the False Claims Act by taking part in a bid-rigging scheme that resulted in false claims for payment under a U.S. Army contract for services in Afghanistan.
The whislteblower will receive a $261,000 share of the government's recovery.
The whistleblower case, filed in 2011, alleged that former managers of PAE and RM Asia funneled subcontracts paid for by the government to companies owned by the former managers and their relatives by using confidential bid information to ensure that their companies would beat out other, honest competitors.
In a related criminal investigation, the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of Virginia previously obtained guilty pleas from former PAE program manager Keith Johnson; Johnson’s wife, Angela Gregory Johnson; and RM Asia’s former project manager, John Eisner, and deputy project manager, Jerry Kieffer, for their roles in the scheme.
