Greetings, and welcome to the Hill International first quarter 2022 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Devin Sullivan, Senior Vice President of The Equity Group. Please go ahead. Thank you, Joe. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for Hill International's first quarter financial results conference call. Our speakers for today are Raouf Ghali, Chief Executive Officer, and Todd Weintraub, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain statements made during this call may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, and it is our intent that any such statements be protected by the safe harbor created thereby. Except for historical information, the matters set forth herein, including but not limited to, any statements of belief or intent, any statements concerning financial projections, our plans, strategies and objectives for future operations are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations, estimates, and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to risks and uncertainties related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the willingness and ability of governments and other clients to undertake and complete infrastructure projects, and our ability to maintain and support business development activities. Although we believe that the expectations, estimates and assumptions reflected in forward-looking statements are reasonable, actual results could differ materially from those projected or assumed in any of our forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from estimates or projections contained in our forward-looking statements are set forth in the Risk Factors section and elsewhere in the reports we have filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including that unfavorable global economic conditions may adversely impact our business. Our backlog may not be fully realized as revenue, and our expenses may be higher than anticipated. We do not intend and undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement. We have prepared a slide presentation for today's call, which is available for your reference at our website www.hillintl.com. The safe harbor provision applies to the information contained in those slides, and those slides also include definitions of the non-GAAP measures we will be discussing today. With that said, I'd now like to turn the call over to Raouf Ghali, Hill's Chief Executive Officer. Raouf, please go ahead. Thank you, Devin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss our 2022 first quarter financial results. After a strong finish to 2021, I'm pleased to report a very promising beginning to the new year. Revenue topped $100 million, increasing 17.4% to $102.2 million from $87 million in 2021. Consulting fee revenue rose 12.5% to $18.4 million from $72.4 million in the prior year period, and was our first $80 million quarter since the first quarter of 2018. New contract awards were $88 million, resulting in a book-to-burn ratio of 1.08. Operating profit improved to $1 million from an operating loss of $154,000 in the first quarter of last year. Our net loss narrowed significantly from the prior year's quarter, and adjusted EBITDA rose to $3.2 million from $741,000 in the same period last year. Our backlog increased for the second consecutive quarter to $736 million, its highest level in over two years. Finally, we have taken steps to reduce our G&A expenses at an annualized rate of approximately $4 million. We believe that those actions will allow us to more fully capture profit opportunities associated with our anticipated CFR growth without sacrificing any aspect of client service or operational integrity. Speaking of CFR, our top-line growth this year was driven in large part by infrastructure projects in the U.S., in particular in roads and highways and transit programs and projects. As we stated last quarter, we believe that the COVID-19 related headwinds that we experienced these past two years are subsiding, and that new delayed projects, especially in the U.S. and Europe, are being given the green light to proceed. Given our contract wins over the last several quarters, our new business outlook for the year and a second consecutive quarter of rising backlog, we remain very confident in our outlook. We are monitoring accelerating growth opportunities across each of our end markets and geographies and continue to see significant opportunity in infrastructure projects. With respect to new awards in Q1 2022, many of our wins were infrastructure related, including delivering project management and project control services for San Francisco International Airport's Noise Insulation Program. Managing construction for the Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority at McKalla Station and Red Line in Austin, Texas. Being selected to provide construction management services to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation's Central Access Philadelphia or CAP project, which will replace and expand the existing bridge structure over the Interstate 95 in Center City, Philadelphia. Being awarded a construction management services contract by the Port Authority of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania for their PAAC Bus Rapid Transit System project, and providing construction management services for the flagship mixed-use project, Marina Towers in Egypt, on behalf of the New Urban Communities Authority. Approximately 40% of new awards in 2022 first quarter were infrastructure related. These awards were not associated with the 2022 federal infrastructure bill, but instead were a combination of new projects and deferred programs that have been reinstated as we continue to exit the lockdowns associated with COVID-19. We continue to expect that we will realize awards associated with the infrastructure bill starting late this year. Our low risk professional services business model provides us with the flexibility and resiliency to grow under multiple economic circumstances. Moreover, our diverse revenue profile, which is driven by varied geographic and market and client exposure, allows us to adapt to changing market environments and quickly pivot towards opportunities as they arise. We reiterate our outlook for 2022. We are forecasting CFR of $340 million-$350 million, an increase of 11%-15% from 2021. Our adjusted EBITDA guidance for 2022 is expected to range between $22 million-$24 million, up from adjusted EBITDA of $16.3 million and representing a growth of 35%-47%. That said, thank you for your attention, and I'll now turn things over to Todd Weintraub, Hill's Chief Financial Officer. Todd, please go ahead. Thank you, Raouf. Revenue increased 17.4% in quarter, coming in at $102.2 million compared to $87.1 million in last year's first quarter. CFR for the quarter increased 12.5% to $81.4 million, from $72.4 million in the first quarter of 2021, reflecting an increase in project activity to pre-COVID levels. For the quarter, the majority of our revenue was generated in the Americas, followed by our Middle East, Asia Pacific region, Europe, and then Africa. Gross profit improved to $31.8 million, or 31.1% of total revenue from $27.2 million or 31.3% of total revenue in last year's first quarter. SG&A rose 6.7% to $29.5 million from $27.7 million in last year's first quarter. SG&A included non-recurring and non-cash income of $0.1 million and expenses of $0.4 million in the 2022 and 2021 first quarters respectively. Excluding these non-recurring and non-cash expenses, SG&A expenses were $29.6 million in the first quarter or 91.3% of gross profit, which compares to $27.3 million or 100% of gross profit in last year's first quarter. This decline in SG&A as a percentage of gross profit reflected our continuing commitment to managing expenses to ensure costs grew more slowly than gross profits. As Raouf mentioned, we have reduced the run rate of G&A expenses by approximately $4 million annually, the initial impact of which is expected to be realized in the current second quarter, ending June 30th, 2022. These expenses were achieved primarily by realigning certain parts of our workforce to improve utilization and efficiency. Operating income improved to $1 million from an operating loss of $154,000 in the first quarter of 2021, driven by higher CFR and improved gross profit, offset by an increase in foreign currency exchange losses and higher SG&A to support our growth initiatives. On an adjusted basis, adjusted operating profit improved to $2.4 million from adjusted operating profit of $161,000 last year. Net loss for the quarter narrowed to $544,000 or $0.01 per share compared to a net loss of $2.7 million or $0.05 per share in the year-ago period. Adjusted net income improved to $864,000 from an adjusted net loss of $2.4 million in last year's first quarter. Adjusted EBITDA for the 2022 first quarter improved to $3.2 million, up from $741,000 in last year's first quarter. The reconciliations for these adjusted figures are included in our press release. Our unrestricted cash position at March 31, 2022 was $23.9 million, and total liquidity was $27.8 million. Net cash used in operating activities was $3.3 million. While use of cash is consistent with historical first quarter performance, first quarter is our lowest cash collection quarter of the year typically. It's important to note that this is a significant improvement from net cash used in operating activities of $16.7 million in the first quarter of last year. Free cash flow for the quarter was negative $4.1 million, which is much improved from negative free cash flow of $17.5 million in last year's first quarter. With the first quarter behind us, we do expect to generate positive cash flow for the remainder of 2022. We have amended our main revolving and term loan facilities to extend the maturity of the revolving facilities to May 2023 and the term loan to November 2023. We paid a fee of 1% on the term loan facility and 0.5% on the revolving credit facility, and we'll pay an additional 0.5% on the revolver at the end of the second, third and fourth quarters of 2022. The interest spreads on both these facilities will increase by 1%. As Raouf noted, our total backlog rose for the second consecutive quarter, improving to $736.1 million from $729.4 million at December 31st, 2021, reflecting our positive book-to-burn during the quarter. Our 12-month backlog at March 31st, 2022 was $264 million. From a geographic perspective, our backlog remained concentrated in the Americas with nearly 48%, followed by the Middle East and Asia region, Africa and Europe. Thanks very much for your time, and I'll now turn the conversation back to Raouf. Thank you, Todd. Thank you for your time today, and I'll ask the operator to open the call to questions. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask your question, please press star one on your telephone keypad, and a confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please, while we poll for questions. Our first question is from Pete Enderlin with MAZ Partners. Please proceed. Thank you. Good morning, Raouf and Todd. Morning, Peter. Good morning. You know, you have had book-to-bill ratios of more than 1.08 in the past, recent past even. I'm wondering, you know, with the infrastructure beginning to start to flow and an economy that's fairly strong, although that's a question about how sustainable that is, were there more wins that you could have gotten that somehow were just delayed at this point in the cycle? Well, Pete, you are right. We've had book-to-burn are much higher in the fourth quarter, and other quarters prior to that. However, typically first of all, our first quarter is usually the slowest one for bookings, just because most of our business is really with the public sector, and it takes some time for the public sector for the awards during the early parts of the year. To answer your question on the infrastructure bill, we have not seen any of the procurement that's coming out of the infrastructure bill yet hit the street. I think it's trickling down through the administrative burden between the federal and the state governments. We're expecting to start seeing really potential awards happening towards the later part of this year. I think I mentioned that during our call earlier. Right. Yeah, the related question to that is, have there been any significant cancellations which, as I understand the way you account for them, would show up as a reduction in the book-to-bill ratio? We've not had any major cancellations. We've had some minor adjustments, as we usually do when certain task orders or contracts. The contracts are not fully absorbed, and they're coming to an end. There's sometimes some minor adjustments, but other than that, we've not had any cancellations, no. Okay, you did mention and have had some reductions in the ongoing level of SG&A. How should we think about that level as a sustainable amount for this year and next? I think the amounts that we've done are sustainable. I'll let Todd as well weigh in on it and add to what I have to say. They are sustainable. What we're doing is not a temporary. This was mainly looking at our utilization, getting it more efficient, looking at some of our indirect or overhead staff and really fine-tuning some of the things. We had added some indirects for some growth that we've seen, and now we're just fine-tuning some of these elements. What do you think the budgetable level of SG&A going forward would be? Yeah. We don't. Go ahead. We haven't really given any. Go ahead, Todd. Yeah, we haven't given any specific guidance on, you know. You have in the past, though. A couple years ago, we did. We're Okay. You know, we don't have any current guidance on the SG&A levels. You know, I think you can look at the run rate, and, you know, as we said, we should be able to reduce from the current run rate that we have. You know, I would add to that that, you know, we've got more efficient, as Raouf said, we have better staff utilization at this point. We've put some efficiencies in. We've been able to eliminate some positions. On the other hand, you know, as we go forward, we expect we're gonna have opportunities to, you know, to make investments to support future growth as well. You know, there will be some counterbalance to that. I think what this really does is it positions us to be able to do that without increasing SG&A and with being able to sustain, you know, current levels. Okay. One more, if I might, and that is, you know, is there anything you can say specifically about the kind of pricing that goes into some of these bids? I mean, it doesn't appear that there's a lot of pricing sensitivity, but I mean, obviously, especially for some of the government business, there may be an increasing amount of sensitivity and pricing competition. It's a pretty competitive business. You're correct. It is a competitive business. Our gross margin has not been coming down. We've been defending the gross margins. We're not going in just to buy work or get work. I think there's gonna be a lot of work coming down, so we're looking at it very carefully. Resources are something, and the talents in the market are scarce, so we wanna make sure we're putting our talent and our resources to best use for both our clients and our shareholders for the maximum returns. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our next question is from Bill Dezellem with Tieton Capital. Please proceed. Thank you. First question I'd like to start with is relative to Libya, did you collect $487,000 in the quarter? Yes, we did. Yes. I mean, that's a, I mean, congratulations, but that is a small number relative to the total. What were the circumstances of that collection, and how are you thinking about future collections, given the now fractured, refractured government? Bill, we continue monitoring and being part of the situation in Libya to make sure that we collect all our money. Again, as I said before, it's a matter of timing. The reason why this time the amounts were relatively smaller than previous times in other collections is because our contract has a certain percentage of collection where we collect in local currency and a much bigger portion of the contract that's collected in foreign currency or hard currency, as they say. This was a portion of the local currency that was being paid, and we got the approval process. Obviously, having a fractured government, it takes longer for approval process and longer for any money to flow. We took whatever we could get, and we continue making headway in order to make sure that we collect every penny of it. At one point, we had the sense that there was some desire on the Libyan government's front to restart the project. I think your mindset was that that would be terrific after they paid you for what you have done. Where are you sensing their mindset is relative to wanting to restart that project? They're very eager to start the projects. They have already been talking to the contractors that were on the project. Contractors were mobilizing. They just finished their one month of Ramadan, which really puts a damper on any activities. It is one of the priority projects, but we maintained our position that we need a significant amount of money before we can go back in there. I'd just like to remind you that, you know, I believe the debt is now outstanding. The debt is $20 million from an initial $60+ million that we had. We've collected a significant amount. In the last 18 months, I think over $10 million was collected. We're expecting to collect more. We see that without putting the company in any high risk, we will support our clients, but just make sure that it's with a low risk and that we've collected most of our money. Raouf, was it a fair perspective that with oil prices being higher, that the government would have a lot more cash available to them? Is that even relevant, is that even a relevant factor given the fractured government? Obviously, with oil prices being higher, there is a lot of additional cash that's coming into the country. The issue of the Libyan government not paying was not lack of money, and it was not them not recognizing the debt, because obviously they've recognized the debt and continue to do so. It's a matter of the political environment that allows them to be able to make payments. The reason to make payments is for them believing that the economy is coming back on and they need to restart immediately their priority projects, which this one is one of them. Having a fractured government does provide a challenge, but we've been collecting money during the previous times when there was a fractured or a dual government within Libya. That, that's helpful. A couple of additional questions, if I may please. Sure. Facilities management, would you please provide an update on that aspect of your business, please? Sure. We continue growing in the facility management. We're pursuing two or three large assignments, mainly in the Middle East and North Africa on the facility management. They have been postponed for the holy month of Ramadan, where things were very slow on it. We're expecting to have hopefully some good news by our next quarter results on it. Well, I won't say congratulations, but good luck pulling that off. I know that you had a big facilities management contract in Saudi Arabia that I'm not sure if it even was able to start before COVID shut it down. Where does that lie? I believe you're referring to the school projects. Yes. Where we're managing, I believe a total, there was a total of 3,000 schools that initially we're managing probably, six hundred, I believe 640 of them. To answer your question, yes, we had started before COVID. During COVID, unfortunately, with the schools being closed down, we demobilized most of our staff. All our staff have been remobilized right now. We continue providing that service. We've gotten an extension for next year, so we continue providing those services. You had mentioned that that was approximately 650 schools out of 3,000. Correct. What about the remaining schools? Is there an opportunity to pick up the remaining? Yes, there's an opportunity. We're waiting for the task orders to come out, and we'll see where they're going to go. Obviously, they have several options. One of them is us. Great. Thank you. Then relative to your guidance, I'd like to just kind of work through a couple of numbers, if we may. The low end of the guidance, if you take off or remove the first quarter CFR, that leaves about $86 million per quarter of CFR to achieve the low end, where it's closer to $90 million per quarter to achieve the high end for the remaining three quarters. The question is, do you anticipate with what you see developing with your business that CFR essentially ramps sequentially, and so we would just see a, I don't wanna overstate this, but really a smoothness to your growth on a sequential basis throughout this year? Is that the right way to look at it, or is there some lumpiness that we need to be thinking more about? Usually our first quarter is probably the slowest quarter. It's just because of amount of working days. You know, you start off the year with New Year's and some vacation time that drills down from January, then you have a couple of public holidays during the first quarter, which really you have February, which is a short month. Typically the first quarter is usually our weakest or slowest quarter in CFR. The second and third quarters are usually strong quarters, even though you have summer vacation as well, which a little bit dampens it, but that's offset by some couple of months that have more than the average working days. You know, one working day difference makes a lot of difference because your cost is the same, but your revenue differs. The fourth quarter is somewhere in between. It's stronger than the first, but sometimes most of the times not as strong as the second and third quarter. This year, given what you've said a couple of times throughout this call about the infrastructure bill projects picking up as the year progresses, do you believe that the normal seasonality of that slowing or a lower level of CFR in Q4 will repeat? Or is this a unique year where you have an opportunity to see CFR grow sequentially in Q4 in spite of the normal seasonality? Well, I think that this year is unique in one aspect. First of all, our 12-month backlog is probably the highest it's been in comparison to the expected book-to-burn. A lot of the anticipated book is already in hand versus having to really book and then burn in the same year. Having said that, we're expecting some additional new wins to come in, so I don't believe that the fourth quarter is gonna be much slower than the rest than the third and fourth quarter, which is usually. Sometimes we see that in this. It's not gonna be due to the infrastructure bill. It's because our backlog is very strong and our 12-month backlog is strong. Well, thank you. I believe the infrastructure bill, if we start seeing the procurement and some of the money flowing, you're gonna get the awards, but you're not gonna have time to really impact the CFR that much by it. Understood. That makes sense. Thank you for the color and congratulations on a great start to the year. Thank you very much. Our next question is from Tim Chatard with Meros Investments. Please proceed. Yes. Hi, thank you. A couple of questions related to debt. My understanding last year was that you were progressing towards refinancing your debt lower as far as rates so that you might be able to pursue M&A. That narrative changed into a situation where the debt was renegotiated and extended at higher rates. I guess, you know, a couple of things there. I guess maybe, you know, why did that occur, and why can't you use unrestricted cash to pay off some of that debt now? That's my first question. In terms of what happened, we initially did have a commitment letter from a major financial institution. You know, if we talked about that, you know, that would have been favorable. Unfortunately, we were not able to get that syndicated. You know, the market was not accepting of what had been proposed. You know, so now we've you know as you see amended and extended so that we'll put in a different you know solution within the next few months. In terms of the unrestricted cash, the levels of cash we're running at now, that's pretty much the level of operating cash we need to have on the balance sheet. Our cash, because we're an international company, we have, you know, we don't have one bucket of $23 million of unrestricted cash sitting there. It is broken up among all the different regions, and even within the regions, you know, there's a number of countries within Europe, within the Middle East, within North Africa, and we've got local operations. So the cash is fairly well dispersed throughout the company, and not just even though it is unrestricted and that there's no restriction on it's not readily available to go ahead and pay down debt because we do need to have that to meet our just day-to-day operating needs and working capital needs. The level that we're at now is, you know, it really is not in excess in order to be able to to pay down debt. We do manage that. I mean, if we you know, do have an opportunity to pay down debt, occasionally because we've got an influx of cash, we'll do that, but typically we're gonna have to redraw that as well as, you know, as the business cycle goes. Yeah. That was my suspicion. I noticed in your debt renegotiation that the banks have, I guess, put the Libya receivables to debt pay down, or they've moved those to the front of the line, requiring debt pay down with those receivables. Can you add any more color to how those Libya receivables will function specifically with the debt? I'm not sure that there's much to add. Essentially, I think the lenders are looking at Libya receivables as kind of not really included in the plan. We don't. I mean, they're not part of our budgeting. They're not part of anything that we really put in. To the extent that we're able to collect over and above, the lenders would like to see that go towards pay down, and we think that makes perfect sense and is a good idea too. You know, so we agreed to go ahead and, to the extent that we get those Libya payments, we'll go ahead and reduce the debt. The formulas are a little bit more, you know, more complicated. You know, we'll go for it because we do have two facilities within the revolving credit facility. There's a domestic and international. In the first instance, it would go to pay down the international facility that is much less. After that, we would look to pay down the domestic facility with anything that we were able to collect from Libya during the year. Back on the SG&A question that's come up a couple of times. In order to hit your guidance for the year, the SG&A in hard numbers is gonna be between $120 million-$125 million, I think. Notwithstanding the SG&A target that you put out there in aggregate dollar terms, the SG&A dollars will rise this year. My question is, what's the best way for us to look at SG&A? Would it be as a ratio of CFR or you in your prepared comments referred to SG&A as a percentage of gross profit. I'm just wondering, which do you think is the best to look at? Do you have any longer-term targets for the ratio that you do think is best? I think that you could look at either. I would not look at it as a percentage of, you know, revenue, you know, because we do have pass-throughs in there that could distort. I think our gross margin or our gross profit as a percentage of CFR, that's been fairly consistent. We expect it to remain to be fairly consistent. Whether you look at SG&A as a percentage of CFR or gross profit, you know, I think you could do it either way and kind of get the same answer. That's the way I would kind of think about it. No, there's no. We haven't put out any guidance in terms of what a target percentage would be of either of those, nor I think would we put out a target other than to say that you should see that percentage declining. You know, we have said that we expect, not just expect, we're very adamant that our costs are going to grow less than our profits, whether you wanna think about that in terms of gross profit or in terms of CFR. You know, we said that we're gonna grow CFR by 11%-15% over last year is the guidance. Our costs should certainly grow by something significantly less than that. We believe there's enough headway within the, you know, the cost base to be able to continue that for a good period of time before really having to, you know, take any step level function up in SG&A. We expect that to continue to be the trend that overall, whether you look at it as CFR or as a percentage of gross profit, the costs in SG&A will continue to grow at a lower rate than that. What we have said, and I don't think we've changed that, is we expect, you know, we're driving towards getting to an adjusted EBITDA to CFR ratio of about 10%. You know, we're still well below that, but we expect that we're gonna get there by continuing to grow the costs less than we're growing the CFR. Yeah. Okay. That's helpful. Yeah. To hit your guidance this year, that SG&A to gross profit would be about 89%. Looking historically here, you had been as low as about 86.5% in 2019, and that would get you somewhat closer to that EBITDA target. But that's good to know that that's the right ratio. Thanks. The next question is from David Siegfried, a private investor. Please proceed. Our next question is from Eric Goldberg, another private investor. Please proceed. Great. Thank you. Thanks, guys, for the update. So I'm a long-term investor in Hill. I've owned the equity for about eight years now. I invested largely because of the sophistication of the board and particularly the sophistication of the management. So that doesn't seem to align with your failures you reported last quarter in your ability to meet SEC requirements, reporting requirements. I mean, surprisingly, it seemed like you didn't have a fully functional billing department. So my question is to Todd, are those problems behind us? Do we have to worry about SEC failures and billing staffing? Is that behind us now? Then a second question, if I may, on the claims management business. Have you started selling that service now and have you contracted and generated any revenue from that? The difficulty of the equity is trading $19 or so. In your sales process, is that starting to become a concern for the sales effort from the clients, potential clients? Thank you. I'll take the first two regarding billing and SEC and leave the others to Raouf. Yes, the billing issues are behind us. You know, we've increased the staffing for our billing department. You know, we've also identified some improvements in the process itself. That has come back under control. We're starting to see the impact of that now. You know, it takes some time to work through, but we have seen an improvement in the year to date so far in being able to take care of the unbilled receivables out there and get those billed. That is behind us. In terms of SEC issues, I guess I need some clarification on the question. I don't know exactly what you're referring to when you say SEC failures. Basically, concerning the reporting failures. Didn't the SEC or didn't you have a compliance- You're talking about controls. Okay. You're talking about the material weaknesses. Okay. Yes. You know, just to put I just wanted to take a step back and put a little perspective about that when we you know we initially had the restatement, the three-year statement you know back in 2017 and finally got that filed in the fall of 2018, we had 19 material weaknesses on a disaggregated basis that were identified. We've spent a tremendous amount of effort since then remediating those. During 2019, we were able to remediate about half of those. During 2020, we were able to remediate the remainder, except for two of them. During the past year, we did complete remediate, you know, remediate all the ones that had been existing. Unfortunately, you know, there was one more that popped up. To put some context around that, the work that we had really done was to put in an effective control system to avoid the problems of the past and to put in a well-designed control system. Largely the work over the, you know, couple of years to accomplish that was completed. You know, what we found during the final year is that the execution of those controls that had put into place was not done on a consistent enough basis, and that led to the material weakness, the one material weakness that we have now. The weakness is more a matter of execution of control than it is of not having the controls in place at all. To explain the way that the auditor's assessment works, they assess the control operation throughout the entire course of the year. They were not consistently performed throughout the course of the year. By the time we got to the fourth quarter, there were no testing issues in the fourth quarter of last year. We did execute everything. Everything was proper in the fourth quarter, but it had not been consistent throughout the year. We're now, you know, through the first quarter, we're testing the first quarter, and the expectation is that, you know, throughout the year, we are compliant now, and we're executing all of the controls properly. We haven't seen any exceptions year to date. We need to continue testing, but there's every expectation that, you know, that we are remediated. We continue to take steps to improve on that. That, when the opinion is issued for next year, it will be a completely clean opinion. Great. Thank you very much. The claims management business, I'm interested in that. Any update on that? Sure. Let me take this one. As of last week, our non-compete has expired, and we are not restricted on how much of the claims business we can take on. To answer your questions, yes, a couple of assignments have shown up, even before, from clients that knew us and needed claims work on it. We have mobilized already some staff, but we are, as I mentioned it last time, structuring it a bit differently. We're going to have it as an extension of our project management services because we continue, you know, as part of our project management services, claims is still a big part of it, especially during supervision and inspection services. We have taken on a couple of new claims assignment. We're expecting that we're going to take on quite a lot more. We are going to be starting that business again organically for now. We're going to do it with existing talent, augmenting it with just a few hires, as long-term assignments come in. We work with a lot of independent consultants that are in that business. Pay only when they're billable. We expect our margins are gonna move upwards because of that business. As it grows, we're gonna relook at the organization, how we're going to develop it once we have a critical mass assembled on the claims business side. Does that give you enough color? No, that was great. Thank you. To me, it seems like an exciting opportunity with incremental investments being somewhat limited. I'm excited about that. In the selling process, has there been an expressed concern over kind of the position of the company now from a you know financial strength? Have you seen that? No, we have not. I haven't had any calls from any of our clients, whether in the U.S. or overseas, concerned about our price of stock and what we're trading at levels we're trading at. I think as long as, you know, we can provide them the services and the quality that we've always been providing, and we, you know, any subs in particular with U.S. state and local and federal governments, as long as we pay our subs on time, I'm not sure that there's any concerns or any issues with what level our stock is traded at. Just one last question. We seem to talk about the Libya outstanding debt on every call. Has there been any thought about just selling that receivable and paying off debt and being done with it? Just like to clarify one thing. I try not to talk about the Libya receivables, but I answer any questions they tell me. Yes, we would, if there was an opportunity to sell that receivable, we would have. Obviously, we didn't because we couldn't find there's very few buyers, and in particular, since Libya was in a flux and, politically. Given where we're at, you know, having started with $63 million of, outstanding debt, bringing it down to $20 million, I think we've taken the lion's share out of it, and we're pretty confident we're gonna get the remainder. It's a matter of time, and hopefully, shorter than, what it has taken so far. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the call back to Raouf Ghali for any closing remarks. Thank you all very much for your time, and have a wonderful day. We look forward to speaking with you in connection with our 2022 second quarter financial results. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.