Contact: Eileen Rivera
703.284.5674

PEARSON GOVERNMENT SOLUTIONS SUBMITS LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE WASHINGTON POST

ARLINGTON VA., July 5, 2005 - Pearson Government Solutions today submitted the following letter to the editor of The Washington Post in response to an article printed on June 30, 2005:

The June 30th article, "The High Cost of a Rush to Security" misses some important facts and fails to explain the rules and context for the passenger screener contract with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) managed by Pearson Government Solutions.

The growth of this contract from our original February 2002 bid of $104 million directly resulted from changes instructed by TSA. TSA substantially increased the number of candidates it originally required Pearson to recruit and assess. It directed Pearson not to use our 950 established testing centers, but preferred to set up more than 150 temporary assessment centers within a specific radius of airports across the country. TSA chose to copy the approach developed by the Federal Aviation Administration to hire Federal Air Marshals, providing Pearson with a 'blueprint' for the entire process. In April 2002, two months after the original contract award, Pearson provided TSA cost estimates for the changed work. When projected to the final number of screeners that were approved and ready for hire, these estimates exceeded $700 million.

TSA approved and controlled the 15-step candidate assessment process and oversaw the establishment of assessment centers, their specific locations and how many candidates were required at each location. Ultimately, Pearson conducted assessments on over 328,000 applicants in order to net approximately 129,000 candidates approved and ready for hire. Pearson accomplished the majority of this task in less than 100 days.

These circumstances are vital in understanding the costs of the contract. For example, telephone charges from the hotel assessment centers often involved the costs of securely transmitting application data. This included transmitting digital fingerprints and photographs of each applicant from the hotel assessment centers every day to Pearson's processing centers in Minnesota, Iowa and Virginia.

For the vast majority of direct costs, Pearson billed TSA directly. We did not even charge a handling fee and had no motive to inflate those costs. We made every effort to ensure that proper amounts were expensed, including stringent criteria for assessment center selection that considered whether the hotel would charge at the prescribed government-approved rate, in spite of the extraordinary demands placed on the hotels.

The Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) audit of this contract, which took almost two years to complete, resulted in settlement of all audit issues and in TSA paying Pearson its full contract ceiling amount of $741 million for the work performed by us and our subcontractors. Prior to agreeing to pay Pearson, TSA briefed DCAA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and Congress on the resolution of the major audit issues and the proposed settlement with Pearson. The TSA contracting officer, Richard Lieber, stated, "I negotiated a settlement that is considered fair and reasonable for the services received."

Pearson met Congress' extraordinary mandate and TSA's contract mission - on time. Indeed, TSA gave Pearson an overall satisfactory rating in its Contractor Performance Assessment Report. We did a job that few other contractors could even attempt, let alone complete. In a time of national emergency, five months after 9/11, Pearson stepped up and helped TSA in its mission of making our airports and air travel more secure. It was, in the words of Admiral James Loy, then Under Secretary of Transportation, "Nothing short of a major and historical accomplishment."

About Pearson Government Solutions

With nearly 5,000 employees worldwide, Pearson Government Solutions, Arlington, Va., serves the U.S. federal, state and local, and international governments; higher education institutions and student financial aid entities; and the worldwide telecommunications industry. The company designs, builds, and operates solutions that optimize the performance of public sector entities in delivering information, benefits, and services to their constituents. Clients include the Federal Communications Commission; the U.S. Departments of Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Justice, Labor, and Veterans Affairs; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Pearson Government Solutions is a business of Pearson, the international media company. Pearson's primary operations include Pearson Education, the Financial Times Group, and the Penguin Group.