A former chief financial officer of Argonne National Laboratory sued a University of Chicago entity that runs the lab for the federal government, alleging that he was fired after refusing to participate in “unlawful billing practices.”
The suit alleges that lab officials had a long-standing practice of discounting by “about half” the amount of overhead costs charged to favored researchers, such as scientists from the U of C. That meant other research programs were billed more than their proportionate share of costs such as electricity, maintenance and repair.
Some researchers at Argonne looked to get such discounts on overhead “for their projects because every dollar less they had to allocate to overhead was another dollar they could allocate instead to pay salary to themselves...” says the complaint, filed Thursday in Cook County Circuit Court. More HERE
