Navy Officer Trageted After Exposing Alleged Fraud
Colleagues warned Sy'needa Penland not to take the job in 2006 that ended up costing her career.
The recently formed Navy Expeditionary Combat Command had a reputation among supply officers for playing fast and loose in the rush of wartime dollars, Penland said, adding that she saw the Naval Coastal Warfare Group 1 comptroller job as a challenge she was ready for.
Within months she was public enemy No. 1 at the command, she recalled. When the dust settled on her career three years later, Lt. Cmdr. Penland was drummed out of the Navy months shy of her 20-year retirement mark after spending two months in jail in a case that garnered national attention. Penland says she was retaliated against for confronting her bosses about what she felt was wasteful spending and is fighting back: she self-published a tell-all memoir and filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking the Navy to overturn her board of inquiry and Board for Correction of Naval Records appeal decision and allow her to qualify for a military pension.
"A Navy officer that was single — that was the catch there — how did I end up in the brig?" Penland, 44, told Navy Times.
In 2008, Penland was court-martialed on allegations of alleged adultery, making false official statements and conduct unbecoming an officer. Penland was accused of carrying on an affair with Lt. j.g. Mark Wiggan, a former colleague aboard the destroyer Stout in Norfolk. Both officers denied carrying on the affair, but prosecutors built their case around testimony from Wiggan's estranged wife and photos found on Wiggan's computer.
Wiggan's chain of command chose not to prosecute him for reasons that are unclear, but the trial was another blow in Penland's struggle with her leadership.
"The command, they kept spearheading this, and I never did quite understand why," she said. Penland alleges her court-martial and subsequent discharge stemmed from her fight to expose contracting fraud.
The Navy argues that she was administratively separated for misconduct and poor performance. A spokesman for the Navy secretary referred questions about the handling of Penland's case to the Justice Department, which declined to comment..
"Because the lawsuit remains pending, we have no comment beyond our public filings," spokesman Bill Miller told Navy Times on Sept. 24.
Legals experts said the case was atypical for two reasons: only one officer was disciplined even though both were implicated, and that the convicted officer was forced out for adultery.
"Show me how this impacted good order and discipline," said defense attorney Larry D. Youngner. "It strikes me as a very interesting pursuit of an officer, in light of the whistleblower complaint, in light of the shared responsibility — assuming for argument’s sake that they were both culpable."
In her self-published memoir, "Broken Silence: A Military Whistleblower's Fight for Justice," Penland details her career and crusade to expose alleged fraud at NECC, what she calls false adultery charges and her ongoing effort to restore her service record.
'Broken Silence'
The trouble started in early 2006, when she checked in at NCWG-1 as their budget comptroller, took on the duties of government credit card program coordinator and contracting officer.
Within weeks of starting, she wrote, she received a frantic call from someone who claimed to work with the defense contracting company Science Applications International Corp., asking if he could send over an invoice billing her command for unauthorized services.
"He
said his company needed to pay their utility bill and the salaries of a
few employees, but he would annotate the invoice to reference 'training
services,' " she wrote. "He kept evading my question, and went on to
explain that it was common practice between him, my predecessor and my
supervisor ... to bill the command for unperformed services and charge
it to a preexisting procurement contract."
A public relations representative for SAIC did not respond to phone messages by press time .
She also had thought it odd that NCWG-1's small facility at Naval Outlying Landing Field Imperial Beach, south of San Diego, had such nicely appointed offices, with flat screen computers and laptops for all, in addition to a newly renovated gym.
She later discovered that the commercial-grade gym equipment had been bought with "cost of war" funds, which are specifically approved by Congress to support units deployed overseas. When she was copied on an email between the command senior supply officer and the commodore, now-retired Capt. John Sturges, discussing buying another commercial-grade elliptical machine, she said she tried to warn the commodore that the expense wasn't authorized.
“I came to realize that the ballooning of the Coastal Warfare budget and the illegal allocation of funds fit neatly into the larger picture of fraud and entitlement in the post 9/11 U.S. military," Penland wrote. "As the new Anti-Terrorism Force Protection strategies were instituted, no cost was spared, and the free flow of funding left plenty of room for greedy and unscrupulous behavior.”
Reached via LinkedIn message, Sturges declined to comment for this article.
One particular contract, with Logistics Support, Inc., caught her eye. She asked to perform an informal review and audit of the command's budget programs, she said, but her leadership thought she was demanding to have them formally investigated. She held off, but continued to gather evidence and question the command's contracting practices.
A public relations representative for LS, Inc. did not respond to phone messages by press time .
“She made it hard for us, but it was never personal," retired Lt. Cmdr. Steve Harper, who worked with Penland when he was a supply officer at Maritime Security Unit Squadron 5, told Navy Times in a Sept. 22 phone interview.
“She was a hard nose at times," he said of working with her. "She was stubborn, as every good supply officer should be.”
Penland said she took pride in her work ethic, but for the first time, she found herself at a command that didn't appreciate her attention to detail.
Criminal allegations
Before she left Norfolk for San Diego, Penland had been a supply officer aboard the destroyer Stout, where she had mentored another prior-enlisted officer named Lt. j.g. Mark Wiggan.
He had confided in her that his marriage to his wife Kim, a chief assigned to the cruiser Mobile Bay, was unraveling and he had become the victim of her physical abuse. Penland loaned him her digital camera to document the abuse; she says she didn't erase the memory card beforehand.
When Mark backed up the photos onto his computer, it backed up the camera's entire memory. That included sexually explicit images of Penland with a man. Kim discovered these in late 2006. Prosecutors alleged they showed Mark and Penland in sexual acts; Penland says they show an ex-boyfriend.
"He said he’d accidentally erased the disc before returning my camera, but it seems he’d kept copies of my nude photographs, which played right into Kim’s alimony plans," Penland wrote.
Months later, Penland said, Kim went to her command with allegations of adultery after Mark's command decided not to pursue charges, she said.
NCWG-1 launched an investigation into the adultery claims in early 2007. She rejected their offer of a captain's mast, heading to an Article 32 hearing in August, where the investigating officer ruled that she should go to captain's mast and face a BOI if found guilty of the allegations.
Her command instead pressed ahead with a court-martial, which began the following year on May 21, 2008.
"Not only was the married husband in this case never charged or prosecuted, but also senior government officials offered him immunity, as long as he agreed to testify against me," she wrote. "Even so, Mark declined the government’s immunity offer and later testified at my trial, denying that he ever had sexual intercourse with me."
On the strength of the prosecution's case, Penland was convicted of the charges and sentenced to 60 days in the brig, a $9,000 fine and a punitive letter of reprimand.
Penland said she was shocked by her sentence at the time, and shocked years later as multiple high-level military officials have been allowed to retire in grade without formal charges following affairs.
Her case also baffled the legal community, said Youngner, the defense attorney and retired colonel who'd been a practicing Air Force judge advocate when Penland was sentenced.
"There’s a lot of reasons in this particular case that make you pause and go, 'Wow, why did they really pursue this?' " Youngner, now a managing partner at the Tully Rinckey law firm in Washington, D.C., said in an interview.
In his experience, he said, it's common for the more senior officer in an inappropriate relationship to get a harsher punishment, which could explain Penland's sentence, but not why Wiggan wasn't charged at all.
On the other hand, it's up to commanders to maintain their own standards, Youngner said, even if Penland's case was harsh.
"It seems to naturally suggest there must have been something else," he said. "What could it be? Could it be that this person has raised concerns, that then-Lt. Cmdr. Penland noted discrepancies? Well, what a great way to get rid of someone."
Fighting back
Once she was under investigation, Penland decided it was time to officially blow the whistle. In April 2007 she filed an inspector general complaint against her command, citing multiple instances of procurement and contracting fraud, as well as budget mismanagement.
In June she filed an equal-opportunity complaint, after hearing from a civilian in the command that her CO and staff attorney told her colleagues about the sexually explicit photos that lead to her charges, and that they had been shown to numerous unauthorized people.
She also alleged that her CO had counseled her for poor performance as retaliation for her IG filing.
The
Navy never substantiated the EO complaint, but over a year later, while
she was in the brig, NECC's inspector general released a July 18, 2008
report detailing three substantiated allegations out of 14 originally
submitted.
The IG found that civilians at NCWG-1 — renamed Maritime Expeditionary Security Group 1 at the time of the report — had against policy performed inherently governmental functions at the command, that contractors had performed personal services for members of the command and that the command had procured office trailers without proper permission.
Penland was then served paperwork starting her BOI while in the brig. She filed for clemency with the BCNR to have her conviction taken out of BOI consideration, but to no avail.
She was given a general discharge under honorable conditions, citing unacceptable conduct for the adultery conviction and poor performance, on July 31, 2009; a general discharge is an administrative measure that is one notch below an honorable discharge. In late December, Penland would have reached her 20th year of service. She first joined as a crypotologic technician and earned her commission from Officer Candidate School in 1997.
Penland has filed several times in the past six years to have her BOI results disregarded through Navy channels, asking to be allowed to retire as an O-4 and receive her pension.
Today, she lives off of Veterans Administration disability benefits, as a blood cancer diagnosis during her last months in the Navy resulted in a 100 percent rating, she said.
She filed a last-ditch effort earlier this year in Washington, D.C. federal court, suing Navy Secretary Ray Mabus to have her BOI disregarded and her full retirement benefits restored.
Youngner, who is not representing Penland, said she could make a solid case if she can prove that her court-martial was unjust, as it was the basis for the board of inquiry's decision to separate her.
He suggested she obtain sworn statements from both her ex-boyfriend affirming it was him in the photos and from Wiggan, affirming that he never had a relationship with Penland. She could then ask to be reinstated to active-duty to face a grade determination board and retire as a lieutenant commander, he said.
"Is it fair to throw her out for a private, consensual activity after filing a whistleblower complaint, after serving her country honorably for over 19 years?" he said. "I say no, that’s not fair. That’s my closing argument."
As of late August, the Navy had acknowledged Penland's complaint and asked for a summary judgment in lieu of a trial, giving Penland 75 days to respond.
At this point, she said, the lawsuit is less about receiving benefits and more about raising awareness about the injustice she went through.
"It’s keeping the issue alive. It’s a 50/50. It’s a gamble," she said. "I don’t want the judge to think that I’m trying to make this a media story, but it needs to be."
She had been writing her story on and off since her discharge, she said, but decided to self-publish it on Amazon.com this year. She's met many other veterans through blogging and social media, she said, and would like to spend her next chapter advocating for them.
"But I had to tell my story first, before I could move on and help others," she said.
The recently formed Navy Expeditionary Combat Command had a reputation among supply officers for playing fast and loose in the rush of wartime dollars, Penland said, adding that she saw the Naval Coastal Warfare Group 1 comptroller job as a challenge she was ready for.
Within months she was public enemy No. 1 at the command, she recalled. When the dust settled on her career three years later, Lt. Cmdr. Penland was drummed out of the Navy months shy of her 20-year retirement mark after spending two months in jail in a case that garnered national attention. Penland says she was retaliated against for confronting her bosses about what she felt was wasteful spending and is fighting back: she self-published a tell-all memoir and filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking the Navy to overturn her board of inquiry and Board for Correction of Naval Records appeal decision and allow her to qualify for a military pension.
"A Navy officer that was single — that was the catch there — how did I end up in the brig?" Penland, 44, told Navy Times.
In 2008, Penland was court-martialed on allegations of alleged adultery, making false official statements and conduct unbecoming an officer. Penland was accused of carrying on an affair with Lt. j.g. Mark Wiggan, a former colleague aboard the destroyer Stout in Norfolk. Both officers denied carrying on the affair, but prosecutors built their case around testimony from Wiggan's estranged wife and photos found on Wiggan's computer.
Wiggan's chain of command chose not to prosecute him for reasons that are unclear, but the trial was another blow in Penland's struggle with her leadership.
"The command, they kept spearheading this, and I never did quite understand why," she said. Penland alleges her court-martial and subsequent discharge stemmed from her fight to expose contracting fraud.
The Navy argues that she was administratively separated for misconduct and poor performance. A spokesman for the Navy secretary referred questions about the handling of Penland's case to the Justice Department, which declined to comment..
"Because the lawsuit remains pending, we have no comment beyond our public filings," spokesman Bill Miller told Navy Times on Sept. 24.
Legals experts said the case was atypical for two reasons: only one officer was disciplined even though both were implicated, and that the convicted officer was forced out for adultery.
"Show me how this impacted good order and discipline," said defense attorney Larry D. Youngner. "It strikes me as a very interesting pursuit of an officer, in light of the whistleblower complaint, in light of the shared responsibility — assuming for argument’s sake that they were both culpable."
In her self-published memoir, "Broken Silence: A Military Whistleblower's Fight for Justice," Penland details her career and crusade to expose alleged fraud at NECC, what she calls false adultery charges and her ongoing effort to restore her service record.
'Broken Silence'
The trouble started in early 2006, when she checked in at NCWG-1 as their budget comptroller, took on the duties of government credit card program coordinator and contracting officer.
Within weeks of starting, she wrote, she received a frantic call from someone who claimed to work with the defense contracting company Science Applications International Corp., asking if he could send over an invoice billing her command for unauthorized services.
A public relations representative for SAIC did not respond to phone messages by press time .
She also had thought it odd that NCWG-1's small facility at Naval Outlying Landing Field Imperial Beach, south of San Diego, had such nicely appointed offices, with flat screen computers and laptops for all, in addition to a newly renovated gym.
She later discovered that the commercial-grade gym equipment had been bought with "cost of war" funds, which are specifically approved by Congress to support units deployed overseas. When she was copied on an email between the command senior supply officer and the commodore, now-retired Capt. John Sturges, discussing buying another commercial-grade elliptical machine, she said she tried to warn the commodore that the expense wasn't authorized.
“I came to realize that the ballooning of the Coastal Warfare budget and the illegal allocation of funds fit neatly into the larger picture of fraud and entitlement in the post 9/11 U.S. military," Penland wrote. "As the new Anti-Terrorism Force Protection strategies were instituted, no cost was spared, and the free flow of funding left plenty of room for greedy and unscrupulous behavior.”
Reached via LinkedIn message, Sturges declined to comment for this article.
One particular contract, with Logistics Support, Inc., caught her eye. She asked to perform an informal review and audit of the command's budget programs, she said, but her leadership thought she was demanding to have them formally investigated. She held off, but continued to gather evidence and question the command's contracting practices.
A public relations representative for LS, Inc. did not respond to phone messages by press time .
“She made it hard for us, but it was never personal," retired Lt. Cmdr. Steve Harper, who worked with Penland when he was a supply officer at Maritime Security Unit Squadron 5, told Navy Times in a Sept. 22 phone interview.
“She was a hard nose at times," he said of working with her. "She was stubborn, as every good supply officer should be.”
Penland said she took pride in her work ethic, but for the first time, she found herself at a command that didn't appreciate her attention to detail.
Criminal allegations
Before she left Norfolk for San Diego, Penland had been a supply officer aboard the destroyer Stout, where she had mentored another prior-enlisted officer named Lt. j.g. Mark Wiggan.
He had confided in her that his marriage to his wife Kim, a chief assigned to the cruiser Mobile Bay, was unraveling and he had become the victim of her physical abuse. Penland loaned him her digital camera to document the abuse; she says she didn't erase the memory card beforehand.
When Mark backed up the photos onto his computer, it backed up the camera's entire memory. That included sexually explicit images of Penland with a man. Kim discovered these in late 2006. Prosecutors alleged they showed Mark and Penland in sexual acts; Penland says they show an ex-boyfriend.
"He said he’d accidentally erased the disc before returning my camera, but it seems he’d kept copies of my nude photographs, which played right into Kim’s alimony plans," Penland wrote.
Months later, Penland said, Kim went to her command with allegations of adultery after Mark's command decided not to pursue charges, she said.
NCWG-1 launched an investigation into the adultery claims in early 2007. She rejected their offer of a captain's mast, heading to an Article 32 hearing in August, where the investigating officer ruled that she should go to captain's mast and face a BOI if found guilty of the allegations.
Her command instead pressed ahead with a court-martial, which began the following year on May 21, 2008.
"Not only was the married husband in this case never charged or prosecuted, but also senior government officials offered him immunity, as long as he agreed to testify against me," she wrote. "Even so, Mark declined the government’s immunity offer and later testified at my trial, denying that he ever had sexual intercourse with me."
On the strength of the prosecution's case, Penland was convicted of the charges and sentenced to 60 days in the brig, a $9,000 fine and a punitive letter of reprimand.
Penland said she was shocked by her sentence at the time, and shocked years later as multiple high-level military officials have been allowed to retire in grade without formal charges following affairs.
Her case also baffled the legal community, said Youngner, the defense attorney and retired colonel who'd been a practicing Air Force judge advocate when Penland was sentenced.
"There’s a lot of reasons in this particular case that make you pause and go, 'Wow, why did they really pursue this?' " Youngner, now a managing partner at the Tully Rinckey law firm in Washington, D.C., said in an interview.
In his experience, he said, it's common for the more senior officer in an inappropriate relationship to get a harsher punishment, which could explain Penland's sentence, but not why Wiggan wasn't charged at all.
On the other hand, it's up to commanders to maintain their own standards, Youngner said, even if Penland's case was harsh.
"It seems to naturally suggest there must have been something else," he said. "What could it be? Could it be that this person has raised concerns, that then-Lt. Cmdr. Penland noted discrepancies? Well, what a great way to get rid of someone."
Fighting back
Once she was under investigation, Penland decided it was time to officially blow the whistle. In April 2007 she filed an inspector general complaint against her command, citing multiple instances of procurement and contracting fraud, as well as budget mismanagement.
In June she filed an equal-opportunity complaint, after hearing from a civilian in the command that her CO and staff attorney told her colleagues about the sexually explicit photos that lead to her charges, and that they had been shown to numerous unauthorized people.
She also alleged that her CO had counseled her for poor performance as retaliation for her IG filing.
The IG found that civilians at NCWG-1 — renamed Maritime Expeditionary Security Group 1 at the time of the report — had against policy performed inherently governmental functions at the command, that contractors had performed personal services for members of the command and that the command had procured office trailers without proper permission.
Penland was then served paperwork starting her BOI while in the brig. She filed for clemency with the BCNR to have her conviction taken out of BOI consideration, but to no avail.
She was given a general discharge under honorable conditions, citing unacceptable conduct for the adultery conviction and poor performance, on July 31, 2009; a general discharge is an administrative measure that is one notch below an honorable discharge. In late December, Penland would have reached her 20th year of service. She first joined as a crypotologic technician and earned her commission from Officer Candidate School in 1997.
Penland has filed several times in the past six years to have her BOI results disregarded through Navy channels, asking to be allowed to retire as an O-4 and receive her pension.
Today, she lives off of Veterans Administration disability benefits, as a blood cancer diagnosis during her last months in the Navy resulted in a 100 percent rating, she said.
She filed a last-ditch effort earlier this year in Washington, D.C. federal court, suing Navy Secretary Ray Mabus to have her BOI disregarded and her full retirement benefits restored.
Youngner, who is not representing Penland, said she could make a solid case if she can prove that her court-martial was unjust, as it was the basis for the board of inquiry's decision to separate her.
He suggested she obtain sworn statements from both her ex-boyfriend affirming it was him in the photos and from Wiggan, affirming that he never had a relationship with Penland. She could then ask to be reinstated to active-duty to face a grade determination board and retire as a lieutenant commander, he said.
"Is it fair to throw her out for a private, consensual activity after filing a whistleblower complaint, after serving her country honorably for over 19 years?" he said. "I say no, that’s not fair. That’s my closing argument."
As of late August, the Navy had acknowledged Penland's complaint and asked for a summary judgment in lieu of a trial, giving Penland 75 days to respond.
At this point, she said, the lawsuit is less about receiving benefits and more about raising awareness about the injustice she went through.
"It’s keeping the issue alive. It’s a 50/50. It’s a gamble," she said. "I don’t want the judge to think that I’m trying to make this a media story, but it needs to be."
She had been writing her story on and off since her discharge, she said, but decided to self-publish it on Amazon.com this year. She's met many other veterans through blogging and social media, she said, and would like to spend her next chapter advocating for them.
"But I had to tell my story first, before I could move on and help others," she said.
Labels: whistleblower
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