Parsons Corporation is an American technology-focused defense, intelligence, security, and infrastructure engineering firm headquartered in Centreville, Virginia. The company was founded in 1944. Parsons has more than 16,000 employees across 24 countries.
History
Parsons was founded by Ralph M. Parsons in 1944. The company delivered electronics, instrumentation, ground checkout systems design, and engineering for aircraft, missiles and rockets during the Cold War. In 1974, Parsons opened the first part of its Pasadena headquarters in Pasadena. In late February 2019, Parsons announced the move of its headquarters from Pasadena, California to Centreville, Virginia. On 8 May 2019, Parsons executed an Initial Public Offering of approximately $500M on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol PSN. In December 2019, it was announced that Parsons and Leidos Holdings Inc. had earned spots on a $4 billion contract to support the cleanup of a former nuclear weapons site in southern Washington state.
Founder's legacy
In 1961, Parsons founded the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation. The foundation became entirely independent from the company in 1974.
Parsons was awarded a contract for a $243 million project to build 150 health care centers in Iraq in March 2004. By March 2006, $186 million had been spent, with six centers complete and accepted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 135 centers only partly complete, and one reassigned to another contractor. USACE progressively terminated the contract from September 2005 to March 2006, eventually requiring Parsons to complete a total of 20 centers with the others to be completed by other contractors. The estimated cost for the completion of the other 121 centers was $36 million. Parsons and USACE disputed the degree to which the final 20 centers were completed. A report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction cited problems, including "high turnover among government personnel... directions... given without agreement from the contractor... program managers' responsiveness to contractor communications, cost and time reporting, administration and quality assurance".
Parsons was contracted in 2011 to implement a custom positive train control system for Caltrain, to be completed before the December 2015 federal PTC deadline mandated by the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008. The project, called the Communications Based Overlay Signal System, failed to meet its 2015 delivery date and Caltrain terminated the contract as a result of "non-performance in 2017 after many months of delay and repeated failure by the contractor to correct performance issues." After the cancellation of the Parsons contract, Caltrain approved a new contract for an off-the-shelf PTC system from Wabtec Corporation.
