A former U.S. intelligence community contractor pleaded guilty to a scheme to win financial kickbacks involving the process for procuring information technology products for an intelligence community agency.
On June 12, the Department of Justice announced that the defendant—55-year-old David Duggin—pleaded guilty to a charge filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.
Charges were originally filed in a criminal information against Duggin on May 19. He entered his plea agreement on his initial hearing date, on June 11.
Duggin pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit offenses against or defraud the U.S. government.
In a court record filed in May, prosecutors described Duggin as a former on-site contractor at an unspecified U.S. government intelligence community agency located in Virginia.
Prosecutors said Duggin was able to exploit his position as a subcontracted senior systems engineer for the intelligence agency to help his coconspirators win bids for IT product sales to the agency. Prosecutors said this scheme lasted from at least as early as July 2018 to as late as April 2024.
Allison Russo, the acting special agent in charge of the Pentagon Office of Inspector General’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service, said, “Mr. Duggin betrayed the trust placed in him by exploiting his access to sensitive government systems to steer contracts for personal gain.”
Duggin’s coconspirators are alleged to have paid him at least $510,000 in kickbacks in exchange for helping them to successfully win contracts for IT hardware and software product procurement.
By arranging this scheme to win these procurement contracts, prosecutors said Duggin and the contractors with which he is alleged to have conspired subverted competitive government contract bidding processes.
Duggin faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and three years of supervised release. He may also be fined up to twice the value of the illicit gains, or twice the value of the losses sustained by the victim of the crime.
The plea agreement states prosecutors would not oppose reductions in Duggin’s overall sentence “based upon the Defendant’s apparent prompt recognition and affirmative acceptance of personal responsibility for his criminal conduct.”
The criminal information filed against Duggin refers to two companies alleged to have paid him kickbacks for steering IT product procurement contracts their way. That charging document does not identify those two companies or any of their corporate officers by name.
The Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the FBI’s Baltimore field office are investigating the case.
