Navy Engineer Wins Bid to Undo Guilty Plea in Procurement Case

A former engineer at the Naval Foundry and Propeller Center in Philadelphia who pleaded guilty to violating the Procurement Integrity Act won an appeal Wednesday to toss the conviction.

The facts that Nicole Schuster admitted don’t amount to a violation of the statute, a divided US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit said.

The parties assumed that disclosure of information submitted as part of a past procurement violated the PIA’s bar on disclosing confidential bid information “before the award of a Federal agency procurement to which the information relates” because the prior procurement was for a product “virtually identical” ...