AIRPORT SECURITY Contract to hire screeners adds $343 million, but why?

Failed memories and contradictions emerge in a government investigation.
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the government changed a contract to hire federal airline passenger screeners in a way that cost taxpayers an additional $343 million. More than three years later, officials cannot explain exactly why.
Homeland security officials say they have no memos, e-mails or other paperwork to document the reason for the change, as required by federal contracting regulations. They have also offered accounts of the decision that conflict with internal government documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The modification to the contract involved switching the interview sites for tens of thousands of airline passenger screener jobs from a contractor's own assessment centers to hotels and luxury resorts.
The change added hundreds of millions of dollars to a contract that increased from $104 million to $741 million in nine months. Federal auditors later called into question $303 millioDepartment of Homeland Security officials said the change was made in collaboration with the prime contractor, NCS Pearson Inc. They said the deciding factor was Pearson's failure to attract enough screener candidates to its own testing centers while hiring for Baltimore-Washington International Airport.
What was learned
Documents and interviews, however, show that the decision was contemplated before the contract was signed and was imposed by government officials well before the BWI project. Pearson officials said they never had a chance to try out their own testing approach.
DHS Deputy Secretary Michael P. Jackson said in a recent interview that the agency does not have paperwork to back up its account and that he cannot recall the details surrounding the decision.
"Honestly, I have no memory of it," said Jackson, who said he was ultimately responsible for the contract as second-in-command at the Department of Transportation in 2002.
On Feb. 25, 2002, the Transportation Security Administration, then part of the Transportation Department, accepted a proposal from Pearson, an education testing company, to use its own network of 925 private assessment centers to interview, test and hire tens of thousands of passenger screeners.
At the time, the federal government also was hiring a fresh force of air marshals to provide protection on commercial flights, using what is known as the federal air marshal model.
That approach called for the use of a centralized hiring location set up at a hotel to fill a couple of thousand jobs.
Documents show that TSA officials wasted little time in discarding Pearson's plan for the private assessment centers in favor of the hotel approach.
On Feb. 26, 2002, one day after Pearson won the contract, a TSA official sent an e-mail that included a plan showing the agency's early interest in using hotels, according to a copy obtained by The Post. "It was one of the things we were looking at early, early, early on," said then-TSA official Joanna Lange, who sent the e-mail.
By March 29, 2002, the decision had been made to start using hotels. Within months, the program would include some of the nation's finest.