Tridec president Bob S. Fritschie said he worked hard to get and finish a federal contract, and said he never had any indication that the contracting office was doing anything wrong.
“Anything they (the VA) did internally, I can’t comment to because I’m not party to it,” Fritschie said. “If you read between the lines (in the report), no one has ever given us a sideways glance that we did anything wrong.”
But VA investigators say Iris Cooper — who was a senior purchasing official at the VA and now works for the U.S. Treasury Department — crafted the project for Tridec before it was awarded in 2009 and broke it into $5 million pieces so it wouldn’t have to be bid out.
The report says Cooper did this because she had a “personal relationship” with Tridec Chief Operating Officer Dave London and Fritschie.
Furthermore, it says Cooper “engaged in a lack of candor” about the contract when investigators asked her about it.
The report says the same of another former VA contracting official named Wendy McCutcheon, claiming she helped steer the contract to Tridec.
Unnecessary costs?
Tridec was paid to create software that thousands of VA contracting officials use to manage billions of dollars of contracts.
But another OIG report issued in 2013 found that the VA already had purchasing software in place, which the creation of Tridec’s software partially duplicated, meaning the “VA potentially incurred unnecessary costs of approximately $13 million.”
Fritschie said he knew Cooper because he worked with her on other techonology projects when she worked for the Maritime Administration and he worked for another company. He approached her shortly after he incorporated Tridec in April 2009.
“I pitched the heck out of them,” Fritschie said. “That’s what every contractor does. That is a valid promoted part of any contractor getting into business.”
Cooper in May and June talked to Fritschie and others within the agency about setting up a purchasing website similar to one she had Fritschie build for the Maritime Administration.
The report says Cooper and other VA officials performed “market research” in July 2009 that was limited to companies that were service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses, operated under a certain contracting code and included the words “custom application” on their websites.
After narrowing the search to Tridec, the VA awarded it the contract in October 2009.
While London and Cooper are personal friends, Fritschie said London didn’t join the company until 2010 and wasn’t involved in getting the contract. Fritchie said all of his interactions with Cooper were business-related.
The company’s website refers to London as a “co-founder,” along with Fritschie’s father, company CEO Bob A. Fritschie.
‘Deep expertise’
The OIG report also says VA contracting officials over-stated Tridec’s experience, it having just been incorporated.
“The fact that Tridec was a new company with no past performance, it is questionable whether it would have been awarded the contract if the requirement (to bid out the work) was completed,” the report says.
Fritschie disputed that, saying: “We didn’t have company past performance but we had deep, deep, deep expertise.”
Before the OIG report was issued, Cooper left the VA to become the senior procurement executive at the U.S. Treasury Department, according to the Federal Times, which reported in February that McCutcheon retired with full benefits.
Tridec, meanwhile, has received contracts totaling $19.5 million over the past five years, according to a government spending website. In addition to the VA work, this includes a multi-million dollar contract with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
This month the VA awarded Tridec a contract worth about $3 million per year over three years to maintain the purchasing system it created. That contract was publicly bid out.
This newspaper reported in 2012 that the company, headquartered on Fishburg Road in Huber Heights and with offices in Maryland and South Carolina, was poised to expand. It received a tax credit from the state of Ohio for its plans to add 25 workers locally. The company currently has 15 local workers.
Fritschie worries that the OIG report could hurt his business.
“Unfortunately, I think it’s going to have a negative impact,” he said. “(The VA) could under-utilize this contract because it could make them gun shy.”
Staff Writer Cory Frolik contributed to this report.
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