Ex-workers contractor ICF

• By BILL LODGE
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Oct 13, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:00 a.m.

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ICF International’s corporate chain holds contracts worth more than $912 million for management of the $10.3 billion Road Home program for the Louisiana Recovery Authority.

Some of that money goes to dozens of ICF’s subcontractors.

But a handful of former Road Home employees is suing the ICF chain and a subcontractor for a bigger slice of that pie.

The former Road Home employees allege that ICF, of Virginia, and some of its subcontractors, which were hired to help victims of the 2005 hurricanes,  bilked hundreds of workers out of millions of dollars in overtime  payments.

ICF officials deny those allegations in court filings in New Orleans.

ICF corporate officials in Baton Rouge and Virginia declined to expand on those denials.

“As a matter of policy, we do not comment on specific pending litigation,” Gentry Brann, ICF International’s vice president and director of communications and external affairs for its Road Home division, said in an e-mail message.

Brann said the same policy applies to other federal lawsuits in Baton Rouge and New Orleans in which former Road Home employees allege they were forced out of their jobs for revealing over-billing practices or because of race, age or gender discrimination.

ICF has denied all of those allegations in formal filings in each of those suits.

The plaintiffs in the overtime suit say they helped process applications from Louisiana residents for emergency funds to help repair or rebuild homes and small rental properties damaged or destroyed in 2005 by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Plaintiffs also have attached records to their lawsuit that show investigators for the U.S. Department of Labor determined in 2007 that ICF Emergency Management Services and one of its subcontractors, Quadel Housing Services Inc., of Washington, D.C., had overworked and underpaid some Road Home employees.

Because of those investigators’ findings, court records show, the ICF subsidiary and Quadel agreed to pay more than $225,000 in overtime payments to about 400 Road Home employees who worked in Louisiana between August 2006 and April 2007. Labor Department investigators  concluded the companies improperly labeled those employees as administrators, exempt from overtime requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Like ICF, Quadel officials have denied the overtime allegations in the suit.