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Bad Buying

How organizations waste billions through failures, frauds and f*ck-ups

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HOW MUCH for a soap dispenser??

Stories about apparently grotesque over-payment by public bodies for mundane items is always good for a headline or two. We saw that back in the days of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in the UK, with reports that schools or hospitals…
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Manipulating the specification for procurement fraud

One of the more creative ways of committing procurement-related fraud is by the manipulation of specifications. It requires a little more skill than simply bribing a decision maker to choose your firm  or over-invoicing a client and hoping…

Peter Smith’s Bad Buying Podcast

The Bad Buying Playlist

With this Bad Buying website we aim to shine a fearless spotlight on the things that go wrong with corporate buying and procurement – failures, frauds and f**k-ups, as I like to say. That does also mean highlighting and celebrating some of the positive ways in which organisations can avoid Bad Buying, as well as sticking the boot in when criticism is deserved. Fraud and corruption are also prevalent in the world of buying, and too often public and private sector bodies globally get away with some truly awful buying processes, practices and decisions that rarely get exposed and analysed. We aim to address that, and as any entrepreneur will tell you, we learn more from our mistakes than our successes. So we hope Bad Buying can help in that way too!

(Picture courtesy Justine Stoddart)

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