San Diego
Two former employees of a La Jolla laboratory pleaded guilty Thursday in San Diego federal court to charges that they falsified testing of soil samples from Superfund toxic waste sites, bringing to five the number of lab employees to plead guilty to crimes, officials said.
According to Assistant U.S. Atty. Melanie K. Pierson, the two defendants admitted that, as employees of Science Applications International Corp.’s Environmental Chemistry Laboratory in La Jolla, they often backdated test results in order to meet deadlines set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
In doing so, the company overcharged the U.S. government thousands of dollars and hindered its ability to judge which waste sites needed the most attention.
The charges were based on a 28-month inquiry that focused on about 1,000 test samples gathered nationwide in late 1987 and early 1988, Pierson said.
The former SAIC employees, Michael Guttman of Santa Fe, N.M., and Michael Beckel of Encinitas, pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting the making of false statements to the EPA, a felony. Both were sentenced to three years of unsupervised probation.
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