Gallup accused of bilking government out of millions

The Justice Department is accusing Gallup, the market research company known best for its polling division, of bilking taxpayers out of at least $13 million via contracts with the State Department, U.S. Mint and FEMA.

The government has joined a whistleblower lawsuit filed by former Gallup employee Michael Lindley, who was 27-years old when he was hired as a director of client services for Gallup. Gallup honored Lindley as "Rookie of the Year" in 2009, and selected him for partnership boot camp.

According to legal documents, one of Lindley's first jobs involved a $7.5 million contract from the U.S. Mint to conduct market research on $1 presidential coins. But Lindley alleges he knew something was wrong when a Gallup partner told him to create two sets of books: one showing the real internal budget, and a second dummy budget for the U.S. Mint using inflated cost numbers. When Lindley objected, he says Gallup executives told him he didn't understand contracting. That's just one of the allegations Lindley makes against "the most trusted name in polling" in a lawsuit that was joined by the Justice Department in August.

Lindley's lawsuit claims he also caught Gallup planning to bid $25 million, more than double the internal cost, on a sole-source contract with the State Department funded with tax dollars. He said Gallup routinely inflated government contracts by two to three times, cheating U.S. taxpayers out of millions.

But one of the most outrageous cases Lindley describes involves the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The lawsuit claims Gallup was seeking a multi-million dollar FEMA contract to measure employee satisfaction. Lindley says Gallup conspired to hire FEMA executive Timothy Cannon as a partner, if Cannon could help Gallup get the contract. That would allegedly be an illegal conflict of interest.

In an internal email referred to in court documents, Gallup CEO Jim Clifton stated if Cannon "gets us a big deal at FEMA...i think we should hire him." The allegations state that Cannon secretly interviewed for the Gallup job while still working for FEMA, and then emailed a Gallup employee: "I got another 500k put on the [FEMA] contract. Cool huh?" Shortly after the contract signed, the lawsuit says Cannon retired from FEMA and falsely stated that he had no post-government employment -- even though he had procured a written partnership offer from Gallup. Eventually, the offer was rescinded amid various controversies.

According to the lawsuit, Lindley raised concerns within Gallup for several months to no avail, and then told his supervisor if the allegedly bad practices didn't stop, he would go to the Justice Department. Court documents say that the next day, Gallup's chief counsel fired Lindley stating: "When you start talking about going to the Department of Justice, we don't trust you anymore."

The Justice Department has also charged Cannon civilly. Cannon's attorney had no comment when contacted by CBS News.

Today, Gallup attorney William Kruse told CBS News: "This case is based on the false allegations of a former disgruntled employee. I am confident that there were no inappropriate actions taken by Gallup staff on government contracts or any other contract for that matter. Gallup looks forward to clearing its name in court."

[ammo17]

no wonder so many greedy companies want to get contracts with te government,nobody and i mean nobody knows where the money is going and to who.lets get bain capital to audit our government as soon as possible before we are all in the streets selling apples.

[sharong59]

This does not surprise me at all as Gallup skewed numbers in the election polls to favor the GOP even tho President Obama was ahead in more states than Robme! I wonder how much the GOP paid them for that!? Didn't matter anyways as we 99% aren't as stupid as the GOP thinks we are! And the really pathetic part is the GOP believed the skewed poll numbers and couldn't understand what went wrong went Robme lost! God, what morons!

[RollotheNorman]

I would think it was probably the Rove led SuperPAC and Community Interest Org. Rove, and a lot of other Repubs have this theory that there are 3-4% weak minded or willed voters who base their decision on whom to vote for on who's ahead in the polls. There was a lot of cr-p talk running about the Dems and the Repubs were mismodeling samples. Always remember that, although some modeling is done, to account for sampling difficulties, the farther somebody goes from a simple random sample, the more questionable the result. Gallup and Rasmussen I spotted right away as being manipulated to favor the RepubliCONs. The bias toward the Republican candidates was too consistent and too extreme for both polls over time, when compared with other polling. Add to that Rove and Rasmussen are personal friends and the original Gallup was Right Wing Conservative Christian and you get the idea.

[sharong59]

This does not surprise me at all as Gallup skewed numbers in the election polls to favor the GOP even tho President Obama was ahead in more states than Robme! I wonder how much the GOP paid them for that!? Didn't matter anyways as we 99% aren't as stupid as the GOP thinks we are! And the really pathetic part is the GOP believed the skewed poll numbers and couldn't understand what went wrong went Robme lost! God, what morons!

[earlysaid]

You ad_iudicium are one sour and revolting republican who really has a problem. No one wants to punish anyone who does an honest and decent job for the government. If President Obama and his supporters, namely me, wanted to punish or destroy adversaries this would not be at the top of the list. It would not even be on a list I have. We want to destroy the hold Grover Norquist has on the republican party for the one percent and their agenda against the rest of the country. We want to destroy the corporate subsidies that are devoid of common sense. We want to destroy the republican war mongers and war profiteers but we will do it by voting.

[ludvig1-2009]

He didn't understand contracting. I guess they said it all there. That's what happens when private sector contractors do work.

[vassalloja]

This is awful news. Gallup has been such a trusted company for so long when it comes to <a href="http://www.granted.com">employment department</a> data. Granted.com has jobs listed for those searching.