By Nicole Blanchard
The Idaho Statesman
BOISE, Idaho — Two Idaho men have been charged with federal fraud and conspiracy charges after an alleged scheme to rig contract prices for firefighting equipment used by the U.S. Forest Service.
In a news release Monday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Idaho announced charges against Ike Tomlinson, 60, of Terreton, and Kris Bird, 61, of Salmon.
The men are accused of five counts of wire fraud and one count each of bid rigging and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. If they’re found guilty, they could face up to 20 years in prison for each wire fraud-related charge and up to 10 years for bid rigging.
The charges stem from years of communication between the men to submit firefighting equipment bids to the Forest Service to undercut competitors and maximize their own profits, according to a court document.
The indictment said Tomlinson and Bird, through their unnamed business and with unnamed co-conspirators, worked together since 2014 to defraud the federal government on contracts for fuel trucks, water trucks and communication trailers — equipment the Forest Service rents from local vendors to fight wildfires.
The agency creates a dispatch priority list of which vendors it will work with based on the bids the vendors submit. Bids are supposed to be confidential so vendors cannot bid lower than competitors, placing themselves higher up the priority list and ensuring their equipment will be requested more frequently.
Text messages between Bird and Tomlinson, as well as call transcripts obtained in a government wiretap of the men’s phones, detail the pair collaborating on bid amounts and discussing plans to “squeeze” competitors out of the market, according to the indictment.
The alleged coordinated bids, which priced equipment at thousands of dollars per truck per day, came as annual federal firefighting costs soared to as much as $4.3 billion in recent years.
The indictment also said Tomlinson broke into a competing company’s shop and later asked that company’s owner to engage in the same bid rigging he did with Bird. That owner declined and, according to a government recording, told Tomlinson “what you and Kris do, back and forth knowing each other’s prices — if they catch you doing that, it is illegal.”
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