The highway capital construction program in the USA in 2005 was $75.2 billion by all levels of government. Capital expenditures are approximately half the total expenditures for highways. The rest is for routine maintenance, traffic services, debt servicing and administration. The federal government spent $33 billion for roads in 2005, or about 40% of the total road capital outlays. The federal-aid highway program provides capital funding through the State Departments of Transportation which in 2005 administeredabout $55 billion in capital outlays. This paper addresses the concerns on the part of the federal and State governments to insure that this large public expenditure is as free of waste, fraud and abuse as possible. The highway construction program in the United States has evolved over the years with a greater reliance on the private sector each year in various aspects of project delivery. While the actual construction has nearly always been handled through private sector contractors, there has been a huge shiftin the last 25 years to the greater contracting out of planning studies, environmental analyses, preliminary and final designs, and construction engineering and overall construction management. Along with this have been changes in construction specifications from method specifications to end-result to performance based specifications. And, there has evolved greater use of new contracting methods including design-build contracting, incentives/disincentives, QC/QA, guarantees and warranties, etc. The public sectorconcern for oversight is heightened by the added pressure of downsized public sector staffs including the loss of knowledge through retirements in the public sector workforce. This requires greater due diligence on the part of the public sector, a need to have the private sector insure much of this role, and a need for new tools to insure that the public's money is well spent. This paper highlights the types of fraud and corruption found in the federal-aid highway program in recent years and notes the types of prevention techniques that have helped reduce abuse in the program. Training courses, guidance documents, peer to peer workshops and construction bidanalysis software are but a few of the ways that fraud and corruption arereduced or detected. A major deterrent of corruption is the use of formalized debarment of contractors by the Federal Highway Administration and the recent history in this regard is noted. By federal law, federal-aid highway projects over $500 million dollars, called major projects, must have project management plans, including financial plans, approved by the Federal Department of Transportation. There are currently about 40 major projects but in several years the number will likely double as the requirement prior to 2005 defined a major project as projects over $1 billion. Other project management tools to insure efficient management of large scale projects include use of the Transport project management suite of software; riskmanagement concepts for cost estimating/cost control and financial management; QC/QA with construction contractors; and value engineering of designand construction techniques. For the covering abstract see ITRD E139491.
Samenvatting