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that the 1986 amendment does not apply to this action and therefore that this action should have been dismissed, as required by the 1982 version of the Act.
I
In December 1981, the Northrop Corporation awarded petitioner Hughes Aircraft Company a subcontract to design and develop a radar system for the B-2 bomber, which Northrop was then constructing under contract with the Air Force. Both Northrop's subcontract with Hughes and the Air Force's contract with Northrop were "cost-plus" contracts, which provided that the subcontractor and the contractor, respectively, were to be reimbursed for all costs properly incurred plus a reasonable profit. Several months after Hughes was awarded the B-2 subcontract, the McDonnell-Douglas Corporation awarded Hughes a "fixed-price" subcontract to design and develop an upgraded radar system for the F-15 fighter aircraft, which McDonnell-Douglas was then building for the Air Force. (Under the fixed-price contract, Hughes was to receive a set price, regardless of costs.) When it became apparent to Hughes that the projects overlapped in significant respects, Hughes adopted two internal "commonality agreements" allocating between its F-15 and B-2 divisions various costs that were common to the two projects.
After costs in the B-2 program escalated, Northrop requested a Government audit of Hughes' accounting practices to ascertain whether Hughes had improperly shifted costs from the fixed-price F-15 subcontract to the cost-plus B-2 subcontract. The Air Force initially concluded, in a June 1986 preliminary classified audit report, that Hughes had improperly billed the B-2 program for certain development costs that should have been charged solely to the F-15 program. Between October 1986 and September 1988, the Defense Contract Audit Agency prepared a series of unclassified audit reports similarly concluding that Hughes had
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