Idaho highway contractors changed records hundreds of times. Then they got bonuses

Companies that are responsible for checking the quality of Idaho’s road materials have altered the results of their asphalt tests thousands of times, government documents show. Those changes may have allowed contractors that repair and build Idaho’s highway infrastructure to get bonus payments when they should have been penalized for substandard work — or even forced to tear up the asphalt and replace it.

For decades, Idaho has paid private contractors to repair and build the state’s vast system of highways, roads and bridges. They are trusted to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars and to ensure the state’s infrastructure is built to last and is safe for drivers.

While roads are under construction, Idaho and other states require contractors to take samples of the asphalt they’re using and run it through a series of tests.

Those tests determine whether the asphalt is high quality and the right kind of material for that road. Can it withstand the winter snow and ice in northern Idaho? Can it withstand all the drivers and truckers who travel Interstate 84 in southern Idaho?

Front-line workers for several companies involved in road construction throughout Idaho were recorded in 2018 changing their test results before submitting the results to the state for payment, a Statesman analysis of government records found.

A Statesman analysis of four highway projects completed in 2018 found that Idaho paid contractors about $8 million, including about $190,000 in bonuses, for asphalt whose test results were altered dozens or hundreds of times.

Internal documents from the Idaho Transportation Department say such changes may have allowed construction companies to receive more money than the asphalt was worth.

For Idaho taxpayers, that would mean more funds went to private contracting firms and less went to other projects to fix potholes, strengthen highways and improve the state’s crumbling transportation network.

Putting Idaho’s roads in private hands

Idaho has relied since the late 1990s on asphalt testing to help determine how much it pays highway construction firms. And the state has largely trusted the private sector to run those asphalt tests — the contractors building the roads, and subcontractors who are allowed to work for the same companies they’re expected to keep honest.

One retired state transportation employee says he has long warned that conflicts of interest and Idaho’s shift to privatizing its road work was harmful, but that he wasn’t taken seriously. A former private-sector employee raised alarm about the integrity of Idaho’s road construction nearly 20 years ago, and a subsequent investigation in 2002 found other employees with similar concerns.

Idaho transportation officials boast that Idaho was a national leader in shifting to a system that has the private sector largely overseeing itself when it comes to road construction, allowing the state to cut back on its own transportation workforce. About 30 other states use a system like Idaho’s, according to ITD.

Concerns about the system’s integrity are now the subject of a federal investigation.

The investigation by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General and the FBI comes at a time when Idaho, like many other states, is struggling to pay for an increasing backlog of road construction projects — facing a projected $3.6 billion shortfall over the next 20 years.

The Idaho Transportation Department on Jan. 31 asked the Idaho Legislature’s budget committee to approve a budget that includes $488 million for road construction.

The concerns also come as Gov. Brad Little seeks to reduce government regulation in a state that has long touted itself as “business-friendly” when it comes to oversight.

“When we reduce the friction on entrepreneurs and businesses, good-paying jobs follow,” Little said in December, announcing that Idaho had become the least regulated state in the U.S.

‘Suspicious alterations’ in asphalt tests

The Idaho Statesman, which began investigating this issue in December, obtained copies of emails, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint presentations and handwritten records through public record requests to the Idaho Transportation Department.

By cross-referencing records and analyzing the data, the Statesman found several lab technicians changed their asphalt test results, making multiple changes to a single result. Those changes can affect contractor pay. The projects they were working on include road construction along Interstate 84 in southern Idaho, along U.S. Route 12 in North Idaho and on a busy stretch of Meridian Road.

The Statesman found cases of disciplinary action against workers who altered test results. They were rank-and-file employees whose job was to take pieces of asphalt and run complicated lab tests to make sure it wasn’t bad.

It wasn’t just one lab technician who was recorded changing test results — or even several lab technicians at one company. Several employees at different companies submitted test results that contained “suspicious alterations,” according to government documents and analysis by the Idaho Statesman.

The term “suspicious alterations” is used by researchers at Boise State University who are studying Idaho’s asphalt testing data for ITD. The term refers to test results that were changed, and where the changes couldn’t be explained as “plausible corrections.”

There are legitimate or innocent reasons to change a test result, such as making a typo, entering a number in the wrong place or running a test a second time but using the same form.

After excluding likely data-entry errors from their early tally last year, the researchers still found nearly 2,000 “suspicious alterations.”

The alterations don’t necessarily correspond with higher payment for contractors, either. In one set of asphalt tests that had many “suspicious alterations,” the contractor was docked pay for lower-than-desirable test results.

Records obtained by the Statesman suggest that altered test results in 2018 weren’t isolated to the labs hired by contractors building the roads. They bled into the state’s own oversight territory.

The state is responsible for spot-checking road contractors’ work to make sure it meets quality standards. ITD often hires those “quality assurance” tests out to private labs — whose tests also had suspicious alterations.

It is fairly common for state transportation departments in the U.S. to outsource their quality-assurance tests, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

Most of Idaho’s tests are performed by private contractors, since the state cut back on resources it needed to run them in-house, said Bill Fogg, a senior technician who retired from ITD in 2016.

“In my opinion, especially towards the end (of my career) there, and I flat told management there … ‘You guys have given the keys of the hen house right into the fox’s hands, because you privatized too much of this,’” Fogg told the Statesman in an interview in January.

“I think there are good companies out there, don’t get me wrong — good private companies,” he said. “But I also think there’s (a culture of) you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

Internal document: Idaho may have allowed ‘reject level’ road work

An internal Idaho Transportation Department document from fall 2018 explained how the test results were altered. Its title: “Impact of Changing Numbers.”

The document shows that a private company — hired to test asphalt on a 2018 highway project in southern Idaho — had submitted test results with several changes. The document estimated how much the changes might have cost the state.

Records obtained by the Statesman show that a lab technician on that project entered a test result for asphalt weight, then changed that result five times. Each change was timestamped, without the technician’s knowledge. What began as 2,289.1 grams was reported as 2,291.2 grams about seven minutes later.

The asphalt from that test went down on a stretch of Interstate 84 near Twin Falls.

The altered numbers affected how much the state paid, the “Impact of Changing Numbers” document says. Instead of docking the contractor $80,364 for subpar materials, the state gave the contractor an $11,320 bonus, it says.

The Statesman reached out to the company that did the test, Horrocks Engineers, to see if it could explain what happened. (The Statesman reached out to three other companies with altered test results as well, but they did not return calls.)

John Stone, an Idaho principal for Horrocks, said ITD had accused two of its technicians of submitting improper test results. He said Horrocks took the accusations seriously.

“It’s a question about our integrity as a company,” he said in an interview.

He said a dozen samples in question have since been re-tested with “reasonably” similar results to what was submitted to the state.

Stone suggested that the changes were due to technicians updating results as they ran tests — and the state giving them no guidance otherwise.

“You may be weighing stuff, and that weight might be bouncing around a bit, and you might look at that scale and … 30 seconds later, it might read within a couple grams” difference, Stone said. “There were times … our testers would look at the scale, and they would determine, ‘Oh, that changed,’ and they would look at the computer” and change the numbers they had entered previously.

The Statesman found differences between the paper records Horrocks kept for that test and the results it submitted to the state.

“There were inconsistencies, there’s no doubt about it,” Stone said. But, he said, “The reporting procedure was never really defined, never has been.”

The lab technician who ran those tests has since been suspended by the state from doing asphalt tests. He will get his certification back soon, Stone said.

“We made a business decision not to challenge” the suspension, Stone said. He said a second technician also was temporarily suspended over similar allegations.

Asked whether he thinks there are problems with Idaho’s system, Stone said he could only speak on behalf of Horrocks, but, “I have no doubt that the tests that we reported were accurate.”

‘Impact of changing numbers’

The Idaho Transportation Department told the Statesman this month that the “Impact of Changing Numbers” document based on the Horrocks test of I-84 asphalt was a “draft” and “only for internal staff discussion and never presented outside the department.”

The Statesman reviewed test records to independently confirm some of the information in the document. One important piece of data couldn’t be confirmed.

The Idaho Transportation Department at first agreed to arrange an interview between the Statesman and a department expert who could answer highly technical questions about the document and others, and about records they relied upon. But the department later changed its mind, declining multiple requests for a fact-checking interview.

“The department is determined not to interfere with (the federal) investigation and believes that any additional discussion of the documents provided in the public records request could result in unintended consequences to the OIG investigation,” ITD said in a statement. “The department remains willing to discuss its ongoing efforts to strengthen and improve its quality assurance/quality control process for highway asphalt testing and acceptance. ITD will wait for the OIG to conclude its investigation before making any further statements related to the investigation.”

Questions from the Statesman about the “Impact of Changing Numbers” document prompted ITD to review its findings, spokesman Vincent Trimboli said in an email. That review found “the draft document overstates the magnitude of difference” caused by altered test results.

“While the document demonstrates that inconsistencies could have an impact, it should not be relied upon for quantifying the inconsistencies,” Trimboli said.

The document suggested that altered test results would have increased the payment to the contractor by $91,684, for one piece of that project. Trimboli didn’t say how much of an overstatement that was.

The batch analyzed in that document was one of 50 batches in that project. ITD ultimately paid the contractor about $9.4 million for the asphalt in that project, including about $140,000 quality bonus, state records show.

The document also warns that the state was paying contractors bonuses for “quality material” but receiving “failing or near failing material,” and that “reject level material is being left on public roads.”

Dave Kuisti, administrator of ITD’s highways construction and operations division, cautioned against drawing that conclusion about the quality of the asphalt.

The Statesman requested an interview with ITD Director Brian Ness. A spokesman instead provided a statement from Ness.

“It is the core mission of Idaho Transportation Department to provide the safest roads, ensure mobility, and support economic opportunity. The condition of our roads and bridges is of the utmost importance in delivering the services ITD provides every citizen in Idaho,” Ness said in the emailed statement.

Ness said that 91% of Idaho’s pavements are in good or fair condition, exceeding the state’s goal of 80%.

“Idaho benefits from the highly skilled private contractors who build our highways in a competitive environment that promotes cost effectiveness and efficiency,” he said. “This innovative spirit and the willingness to continuously improve is reflected in the high quality, nationally recognized and award winning services we provide to every user of Idaho’s transportation system.”

Are Idaho’s roads safe and sound?

Concerns about the integrity of Idaho’s road construction have raised alarms throughout the government.

The Federal Highway Administration sent a team out to Idaho in 2017 to conduct a forensic review on 13 roadways in the state.

The team looked at 10 roads in person or on video, but didn’t look at the other three. Six of the 10 the team looked at were in good shape, but four highways showed “moderate” distress, the FHWA’s forensic report said. (Moderate distress usually means cracks of various types, but it can mean other issues like potholes.) Those distressed roads were two to five years old.

The team also found puzzling test results in the records for some roads. One of those roads — a stretch of U.S. Highway 95 that leads to Council — had test results that seemed to defy physics.

“The test results that we were seeing there … weren’t making logical sense to us,” Kuisti said. He said that “either the tests are being run improperly, or there’s some kind of variance in the mix we’re not aware of, or somebody’s doing it wrong.”

That road was part of a $6.7 million project that took “just 54 days” to complete, used more than 50,000 tons of asphalt and won a national award, ITD wrote in 2015. That road was built in late summer and early fall of 2014.

When the forensic review team looked at it three years later, it already showed moderate distress, far earlier than it should. A 2005 study by the Asphalt Pavement Alliance, a coalition of pavement industry trade groups, found it takes an average of 22 to 28 years for asphalt roads to show moderate distress.

After that visit, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General opened an investigation, with involvement from the FBI and federal prosecutors.

But it wasn’t until 2018 that technicians were documented, likely without their knowledge, making “suspicious alterations” in asphalt tests through the tracker in the Excel workbooks.

According to the Idaho Transportation Department, state transportation employees put a tracking function in the Excel workbooks ITD issued for use on road projects in 2018. ITD declined to answer questions about the tracking function, including what prompted its use or whether it was used before or since 2018.

The computerized system allowed a person to enter in a test result, run it through a formula and draw a conclusion: whether the asphalt was good enough to stay on the road.

Contractors didn’t know the workbooks were tracking what they entered, Wayne Hammon, CEO of Idaho Associated General Contractors, told the Statesman.

“We meet as a group to set policy. I attend 98% of those meetings, and it was never brought up,” he said in an interview. “No one was ever told they were being tracked.”

It is unclear whether ITD had any other way of checking for changes to test results before 2018.

The tracking function recorded each instance of a lab technician changing a number in the Excel workbook. It logged who made the change, what lab they worked for, and the exact time they changed the number.

The Excel tracking function was mentioned in a recent meeting of the Ada County Highway District, describing it as an attempt at “hacking” by ITD. The ACHD chief of staff said at the meeting that the district hired a forensic consultant to examine the workbooks and plans to give the findings to its lawyer.

The Statesman independently analyzed the workbooks and the data trail they created, and compared those records with others provided by ITD under a public record request.

The Statesman found that technicians made “suspicious alterations” in multiple road-construction projects in 2018, while working for multiple different Idaho companies.

It’s unclear how the tracking function and its data trail relates to the federal investigation, if at all.

But at least one company whose workbooks contained “suspicious alterations” has been contacted by federal investigators. The Idaho Associated General Contractors also talked with federal investigators more than a year ago, according to Hammon.

Hammon said he doesn’t believe there’s much to the federal investigation. He said nobody has come to him to complain of a “widespread” problem in Idaho’s road-construction industry.

“There’s been quality problems (in road construction) for 80 years, and we continually improve the specifications,” he said. “I wouldn’t say, no, there’s never a problem, I just think it’s a natural part of always striving to be better.”

Hammon was interested enough to be monitoring correspondence about it. Hammon told the Statesman he filed a public record request for any materials released to the media on this topic — which included records released to the Statesman.

Asked what prompted him to ask for those records, he said he “was curious about who they were talking to and why.”

Hammon said he files several public record requests like that a year.

“I spend a lot of time at ITD,” he said. “I spend more time at ITD now than I did when I was working in (state) government. … I spend an awful lot of time down there to make sure that things keep moving forward.”

Whistleblower nearly two decades ago

The current investigation echoes an inquiry in 2002, when a whistleblower claimed he was pressured to falsify asphalt test results for two years.

That investigation, like the current one, was led by the U.S. DOT’s OIG.

Mark Draper came forward that year to say he had been falsifying test results for Strata, an engineering and testing company that works on Idaho road construction projects still today. Draper told the Statesman in recent interviews, and investigators in 2002, that his manager told him a contractor for which he falsified results was a “million dollar client.”

Strata is also one of the companies whose tests in 2018 contained “suspicious alterations,” according to government records.

The company did not respond to calls from the Statesman.

A Strata official at the time told a reporter that Draper was “a disgruntled former employee and denied that the company had pressured him to fake test results.” Then-ITD Director Dwight Bower said “he doubted that asphalt on state roads was substandard” but asked Idaho State Police to investigate nonetheless, according to an Associated Press story published in The Times-News in June 2002.

The Statesman obtained records from that investigation through a public record request.

Investigators confirmed some of Draper’s allegations but did not find evidence that confirmed he was pressured by Strata management to falsify results, nor that falsification was pervasive.

Investigators at the time said Draper’s original test results for that road gave “FAILING TEST RESULTS that, if reported accurately, would have resulted in (asphalt) being removed and a new asphalt mix design needing to be developed. Because false test results … were reported, the entire ‘Amity to Kuna’ project proceeded with an INFERIOR ASPHALT MIX being used.”

After Draper came forward, the Idaho Transportation Department changed at least some of its policies — including having ITD’s own people watch contractors’ lab tests or do the tests themselves.

The department told the Statesman that those policy changes lasted until the next construction season.

Concerns about Idaho’s road construction quality aren’t limited to the 2002 inquiry.

A former ITD employee told the Statesman he has long been concerned that Idaho’s road construction is compromised. Fogg, the former senior technician, said he retired from ITD earlier than planned, after a 30-year career at the agency, because he was “a little bit fed up with management.”

When he started working for ITD in 1986, the department had “a fully staffed lab,” Fogg said. “Over the years, management kept dwindling it and privatizing it.”

Boise State researchers are crunching numbers

The Idaho Transportation Department in 2018 enlisted a team of current and former Boise State University researchers to study this issue. Among other things, they have been running the data gathered by the Excel workbooks through algorithms that are designed to flag problems, and figure out whether those problems cost the state money.

They presented early findings in June 2019 to the project’s advisory committee, which includes staff from ITD and the Federal Highway Administration.

Test results with a major effect on contractor pay had been altered more often than those that didn’t have a major effect — in one case, about 10 times as often, they found.

The project is still in progress.

“I would like to highlight one point, is that the data is still being analyzed,” said Deb Mishra, who now works for Oklahoma State University but is still the lead researcher on the project. “So we don’t yet have final conclusions. … We are basically still analyzing the data, and we are trying to make sense of what is happening.”

Hammon, of Idaho AGC, also noted the results are not conclusive.

“The analysis is just getting underway and is not complete,” Hammon said. “Further analysis we’ve done (has) concluded that it’s not as headline-grabbing as they first thought when they started, and I think when they finish their report, that will be” borne out.

The Statesman obtained through a public record request to ITD the same data given to the researchers.

For a sample of tests, the Statesman requested the original handwritten forms, to see how they compared with the data.

In the first asphalt test the Statesman looked at, a technician had keyed in an asphalt sample weight of 2634.4 grams. He changed it to 2636.4 about five minutes later, then to 2638.4 nine seconds after that. On the handwritten results sheet, the technician explained why one digit of “2638.4” appeared to have been altered.

The technician’s explanation for changing his original results: “Tired and horrible at writing eights while tired.”

Several other test results had altered digits, as well. It’s unclear how much the alterations may have affected the outcome for the contractor.

The technician whose name is listed on that test had his certification suspended.

That technician was certified to test asphalt in May 2008 and as a pavement inspector in March 2016. Both certifications were suspended since 2018, state records show.

The Statesman found recent suspensions for at least two other asphalt testers who had been certified to run tests for many years.

They all worked on projects whose test results were flagged for “suspicious alterations.” They all worked at different labs, owned by different companies.

Idaho AGC’s Hammon was unable to explain why, if nothing was done improperly, at least three companies had employees whose test results contained anomalies and whose certification was suspended after those anomalies were found.

He said a committee makes certification decisions, and he’s not included in those discussions.

“There aren’t any contractors on that committee,” he said. “We have asked multiple times to have a contractor on that committee.”

What happened? and when?

Shortly after taking office last year, Gov. Brad Little learned from ITD that there were “questions about the state’s asphalt quality control and quality assurance processes,” a spokeswoman from the governor’s office said.

Little sent ITD Director Brian Ness a formal request to explain “the procedures ITD currently employs or intends to implement to ensure all roads paid for by the taxpayers of Idaho meet all applicable standards.”

Little wanted to know: how ITD oversees highway work, how it tests the quality of highway construction, who does those tests, and how Idaho could make sure Idahoans get the best roads at the best price.

“The efficient use of taxpayer dollars is one of the highest priorities to Governor Little,” the governor’s spokeswoman said in an email Wednesday. “The safety of Idahoans and our roadways is also of utmost concern to the Governor. He appreciates and is encouraged by ITD’s efforts to improve its asphalt quality control and quality assurance processes, and he expects every agency to continually work to improve its performance and the efficient use of taxpayer dollars.”

Ness sent a report to Little in April — describing the past, present and future of Idaho road construction.

Before the 1990s, Idaho was heavily involved in road construction, it explained. The state transportation department would tell contractors how to choose asphalt materials, guide them on the best recipe to use for pavement, and run the asphalt tests.

But construction oversight changed in the late 1990s. There was a nationwide shift to privatize road work. Idaho was one of many states that moved in that direction and “was a leader in this initiative,” ITD told the governor.

Between 1998 and 2002, the state privatized its duties to “increase quality” and give contractors “more involvement and responsibility” for their work, the report said. That had “many positive results,” such as needing fewer state employees to test road-construction materials, the report said.

Instead of telling contractors what to do, and controlling the tests that confirmed their work met expectations, Idaho put contractors in charge. They would run their own tests, and ITD would spot-check their work — often hiring private labs to do those spot checks.

The private labs hired by the state to check contractors’ work may also be employed by that contractor on a different project — and indeed, some of them work for both sides, state transportation officials and Hammon confirmed.

“If they helped a contractor do the mix design, they’re not allowed to do the testing on that mix design, but they’re allowed to do other projects” for that contractor, Hammon said.

Idaho’s process was approved and has “always been approved” by the Federal Highway Administration, ITD told the governor. (The state must get FHWA’s blessing, because FHWA pays for a huge share of each state’s highway construction. In 2018, Idaho received about $301 million in federal highway funds.)

ITD said that privatizing the system “greatly streamlined the process where contractors did not need to wait for state results to proceed with the work, for needed production adjustments, or for progress payments.”

‘Unexpected variations’ in asphalt tests

The report to Gov. Little said that asphalt tests in 2016 revealed “unexpected variations” that called into question whether ITD could trust the quality of the road work on those projects.

ITD “worked with contractors” to try to “understand and attempt to resolve the unexpected variations revealed by the state (quality assurance) testing,” the report said.

What was the outcome of that attempt?

“We were unable to determine the cause for most of the inconsistencies,” a spokesman said in an email.

Staff from the department reached out to the Federal Highway Administration and, later, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General, which opened its investigation.

A spokesman from the OIG told the Statesman the office does not confirm, deny or comment on investigations.

He said the OIG doesn’t always open investigations when approached with a complaint. When it does open investigations, he said, the office sometimes runs them in tandem with the FBI. The FBI and OIG then may deliver their findings to federal prosecutors, who can decide whether to bring charges.

Asked how long that generally takes, the spokesman said OIG investigations don’t have a typical timeline.

What has ITD done to fix this?

The Idaho Transportation Department has made some changes since 2017.

The agency told the governor in an update last December that it has changed when and where asphalt testing happens, added new tests to the process and increased its density requirement for pavement.

“We will be sharing state and contractor test results more efficiently through the use of a web portal, which will provide for timely monitoring of asphalt pavement characteristics,” the agency wrote. “Finally, we have defined a more thorough process for capturing original test result ‘source documentation’ and for maintaining our material sample security and the chain of custody.”

Years after department staff first became concerned about testing anomalies, ITD also changed how it pays contractors. The state in November began paying based on ITD’s test results — not based on the results reported by contractors.

But many of ITD’s tests still won’t be done by ITD staff.

Even though the 2018 workbooks caught “suspicious alterations” in tests ITD outsourced, the department doesn’t plan to rebuild its own testing lab.

When it doesn’t have enough technicians of its own to handle its asphalt testing, the department will turn to private companies to test on its behalf.

Tips? Contact us

Do you work in Idaho’s road construction industry? Are you a former employee? If you think we have more to investigate, contact reporter Audrey Dutton at adutton@idahostatesman.com or (208) 377-6448.

Be heard

Tell state leaders what you think. Click on names below to send an email to officials who run Idaho’s government.

• Idaho Gov. Brad Little: governor@gov.idaho.gov
• Brian Ness, director of Idaho Transportation Department: brian.ness@itd.idaho.gov
• Scott Bedke, Idaho Speaker of the House: SBedke@house.idaho.gov
• Brent Hill, Idaho Senate President Pro Tem: bhill@senate.idaho.gov

This story first appeared on the Idaho Statesman. It is used here with permission.