Military landlord mistreated service members even after investigation began, says Senate panel

One of the military’s largest private housing contractors continued to mistreat service members living in their housing units even thought it was investigation, according to a bipartisan report released by a Senate subcommittee Tuesday morning.

The company, Balfour Beatty Communities, which operates housing communities at 55 military bases across the country, ultimately plead guilty to defrauding the military late last year.

It was ordered to pay over $65 million in December 2021 after pleading guilty to defrauding the Army, Air Force and Navy by submitting false reports to get performance bonuses between 2013 and 2019.  

In its 51-page report, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) says that Balfour continued to engage in a lot of the same misconduct after 2019, even when it knew it was under investigation by the Department of Justice.

“The types of improper behavior uncovered by PSI at Balfour after 2019 bear striking similarities to the types of conduct which Balfour admitted to in its December 2021 guilty plea for actions it took between 2013 and 2019,” the panel wrote.

The committee released the report ahead of a Tuesday morning hearing, where service members, a military spouse, and housing advocates are scheduled to testify before the panel. Representatives of Balfour Beatty Communities are also slated to testify. 

Balfour has not seen the report in its entirety, PSI officials told reporters on Monday ahead of Tuesday’s hearing. The company has seen excerpts of interviews the subcommittee has conducted.

PSI officials emphasized that the report and Tuesday’s hearing were just the first steps, and that the panel will be pursing this issue further.

PSI’s report focuses on alleged misconduct that occurred at Fort Gordon-Georgia and Sheppard Air Force Base-Texas.

The subcommittee obtained over 11,000 pages of records, interviews with over a dozen military family members and former Balfour employees, as well as briefings from the Department of Defense and advocacy groups and families.  

The report, among other things, found that Balfour’s staff frequently ignored or delayed responding to urgent requests from military families to address conditions such as mold and roof leaks at Fort Gordon.  In several cases, these delays led to families seeking care for skin conditions and respiratory symptoms.

The panel also found inaccuracies and omissions in Balfour’s internal work order database, which the military services use in-part to determine the company’s performance award fee.

For example, the panel found several instances where families at Fort Gordon and Sheppard reported mold in their homes, but Balfour’s work order database instead cited requests related to mold as other issues like “internal repairs” or “painting.”

The panel found that in 2020 and 2021, the company still had incomplete and inaccurate data in its database for repairs at Sheppard and Fort Gordon.