BLM Employee Admitted to a Conflict of Interest and to Submitting False Documents to the BLM

The OIG investigated allegations that a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) employee violated conflict of interest laws by steering BLM contracts to a business that he owned. The employee admitted to the conflict of interest and that his actions were wrong. We found that the employee’s wife owned a business and that between April 2016 and August 2017, the employee steered 11 contracts, totaling $27,409.60, to his wife’s business. We also learned that in December 2017, the employee submitted an altered purchase approval form to facilitate payment to his wife’s business, but the BLM did not pay that claim. We did not find that the business failed to provide any of the services for which it was paid. Finally, we determined that the employee failed to list his wife’s business as a source of reportable income for his wife on his annual Confidential Financial Disclosure Reports that he filed with the BLM in 2016, 2017, and 2018. The employee agreed that he should have disclosed the information but denied that he intentionally omitted it as an effort to conceal that his wife owned the business. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Montana declined prosecution. This is a summary of a report we provided to the BLM Director.