by Ben Vernia | December 31st, 2023
On December 15, the Department of Justice announced that it had filed a complaint-in-intervention in a case against Insect Shield, LLC, for falsifying test results of insect repellent the company had contracted to provide for Army uniforms. According to DOJ’s press release:
The Justice Department has filed a complaint under the False Claims Act against Insect Shield LLC for allegedly causing the submission of false claims to the Department of Defense (DoD) under contracts to provide Army Combat Uniforms. The government has also brought claims against the Estate of Richard Lane, who was the founder, majority owner and chief operating officer of Insect Shield until his death in December 2022.
According to the United States’ complaint, several manufacturers of Army Combat Uniforms subcontracted with Insect Shield to apply permethrin, an insect-repellant, to Army uniforms and to conduct contractually-required testing to ensure that the level of permethrin it applied to the uniforms fell within the limits specified in the contracts. The complaint alleges that Insect Shield and Lane falsified the results of its permethrin testing to conceal failing test results, including by inappropriately combining results from different rounds of testing, re-labeling test samples to hide the true origin of the samples and performing re-tests of uniforms in excess of what the contract permitted.
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