Honeywell has agreed to pay $13 million in fines and compliance costs after company officials sent multiple engineering and technical documents to China with details of multiple aircraft, including the Lockheed Martin F-35 and F-22, over a seven-year period, the U.S. State Department said May 3.
The settlement allows Honeywell to pay $8 million in fines over a two-year period, plus another $5 million on compliance measures, according to the consent decree released by the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC).
The measures include conducting an audit of the company’s arms export compliance program and hiring an external compliance officer to oversee Honeywell’s adherence to the terms of the settlement, Honeywell said in a statement to Aviation Week.
The State Department reviewed 71 drawings that Honeywell exported or transferred to China, according to a charging document. The unauthorized release of drawings for parts and components for the engines of the F-35, F-22 and Boeing B-1B “harmed U.S. national security,” the DDTC document said.
Honeywell’s statement does not acknowledge any harm to national security due to the self-reported offenses.
“The issues Honeywell reported involved technology that was assessed as having an impact on national security, though is commercially available throughout the world,” a Honeywell spokesman said. “No detailed manufacturing or engineering expertise was shared.”
The arms export violations occurred over two different periods, according to the DDTC charging document.
In July 2015, Honeywell Aerospace’s Integrated Supply Chain (ISC) exported drawings with data controlled under International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) to China and Taiwan, the charging document said. Honeywell self-reported the violations in December 2015, and informed the State Department of the corrective actions it was taking to prevent further violations in September 2016.
But Honeywell reported another series of ITAR violations in October 2018. The ISC organization had without authorization developed a new process to get around the previous corrective actions to comply with an accelerated procurement schedule, according to the charging document.
ISC believed the alternative process complied with the ITAR, but the team “either failed to review the export control classifications for multiple technical documents or used a classification analysis method that did not properly categorize the documents,” according to the charging document.
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