Tag Archive for: Fraud

The election of Donald Trump in the US was one of the biggest global news stories of 2024, but our election back in July was significant for the UK, as voters rejected the Conservative government which had been in charge for some 14 years. The feeling that it was ‘time for a change’ was overwhelming, and the last few years felt chaotic with infighting and clear incompetence in evidence from the ruling party.

However, six months into the new Labour government, initial public enthusiasm has already worn thin given tax rises, stories about Ministers receiving gifts and entertainment and some dubious policy decisions.  But how is Labour doing in terms of public procurement?

In truth, it is too early to say. The implementation of the new Procurement Act was postponed from October to February 2025, and we are waiting for the ‘National procurement policy statement’ which in theory will set out the overarching priorities for public procurement.

But the early indications have not been too promising. Labour came to power promising better governance and a fight against corruption, but have done very little. The much-vaunted ‘Covid Corruption Commissioner’ has turned out to be a part-time appointment for 12 months, with limited resources behind him, and a wider brief than expected.

Other areas of potential corruption have not been tackled. The way money has been spent and some very dubious public procurement up on Teesside, which Private Eye has been going on about for years, really needs proper investigation, but there has been nothing at all from Labour. (The mayor, Ben Houchen, is a Tory, although maybe Prime Minister Starmer thinks Houchen could defect at some point – that is the only reason I can see for not taking a look at his activities).

The furore over tickets for events and gifts of clothing to politicians demonstrated a lack of awareness of how this would be perceived, and some very silly comments from Labour supporters saying, ‘oh well, everyone in the private sector behaves like that’. That received swift rebuttal from many of us pointing out that firms we worked for had pretty strict policies on such matters, and no, I’d never had a pair of glasses bought for me by a supplier!

Then we have the spending review announced in December with  goal to find “efficiency savings within government spending of 5%”, which looks like an unchallenging re-tread of previous approaches.  But hang on a minute, “departments will be asked to reach this figure over the three-year review period, and will be able to reallocate money saved within their budgets”.  So not really savings at all then, just moving the money around to give the impression of activity!

 It also demonstrated a general lack of understanding of procurement (and business generally) amongst Ministers. Not one member of the Cabinet has any real business background, sadly. The Treasury said that external experts would be brought in to help the review, to “include former senior management of Lloyd’s Banking Group, Barclays Bank and the Co-operative Group”.

Having been a procurement director in the financial services sector, I know that banks have not exactly been the best-run businesses from a procurement and general efficiency point of view. Far better to have looked to sectors such as automotive, pharma, or consumer goods to get some more advanced ideas.

A naivety about commercial matters was evident elsewhere too. To Labour’s credit, they set out plans in November to prevent companies that run children’s homes from making excess profits, as many appear to do whilst also providing sub-standard services.  But the mechanisms proposed are naïve.  The BBC reported that “will require major care home providers to share their finances with the government, so it can challenge what it describes as profiteering. This will also include a “backstop” law that would place a limit on those profits, which the government can put into effect if the companies do not do so voluntarily”.

But this only applies to large providers who account for about a quarter of the market. And the lack of commercial understanding comes through in the suggestion that the answer is to ask those firms nicely to charge fair prices, and take action if they are ‘profiteering’ (whatever that means).

Of course, any of us who have been in procurement for a few years can immediately think of half a dozen ways in which a supplier can disguise or manipulate profit figures. Just pay the directors more for instance… or use inter-company loans … or set up subsidiaries to move money around… 

This lack of commercial experience and capability at the political level is a problem for Labour. It also suggests that the appointment of a successor to Gareth Rhys Williams as government’s Chief Commercial Officer is even more important than it might have been. Of course, one person can’t be expected to fix everything, but I suspect the new GCCO will need to spend a lot of time educating Ministers and explaining how the world of commercial and procurement matters really works.

When I lecture on Bad Buying, as I do at the Skema business school in Lille, I ask the students to think about what sort of procurement related fraud or corruption is particularly difficult to protect against or detect – and why. Certainly right up there in the top three examples is the supply of goods or services that deliberately and maliciously don’t meet the quality level or specification agreed between supplier and buyer.

So the supplier substitutes an inferior product (or service, although more often this is seen with supply of goods) that costs less to provide, meaning the supplier makes additional profit margin and the buyer potentially suffers from the lower quality provided. It may not cause a major issue for the  buyer – but in some cases, it certainly does.

A case included in the Bad Buying book covered oil supply.  “In March 2015, a case going back to the 1990s finally came to the courts. Global trading giant Glencore was ordered to pay $40 million to OMV Petrom SA (a large oil company, headquartered in Romania), by a UK court, for shipping oil of a lower quality than it was supposed to be to the firm in the 1990s.

Bloomberg reported that Marc Rich & Co., which went on to become Glencore International AG, sold about 32 shipments to Romanian state firms from 1993 to 1996. But this was cheaper crude oil blends than the specification that had been promised. The seller falsified documents to support the fraud, which made it some $40.1 million, according to evidence in court. The fraud only came to light when a former trader from Glencore split the beans to Petex, the firm that had organised the oil importing process.

This case showed how difficult such frauds can be to detect, as the client here actually didn’t notice anything amiss.  One barrel or tanker of oil looks very much like another!  But a recent case demonstrated an interesting twist on this. The danger for the supplier is obviously that the client spots the deception. So how about bribing the buyer(s) to turn a blind eye to what is going on?

That appears to be what has happened in Rome. The Vatican celebrates a Jubilee next year – it will be the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea (325 AD), and I’m sure we can all see just how important it is to celebrate that in 2025. So Rome is preparing for millions of visitors and is trying to tidy up its somewhat run-down and chaotic infrastructure. Residents have been complaining about potholes in the roads for some time, and even when they were ‘repaired’ somehow the problems seemed to re-occur very quickly.

The cause seems to be a group of allegedly crooked city officials and road workers, conspiring in league with a dodgy supplier who provided substandard asphalt for the road repairs, material that crumbled far too quickly. Raids on the Rome city hall recently searched for documents that police claim show the firm paid kickbacks to officials to win contracts worth 100 million euros.  

The firm also offered jobs to the children of officials, it is claimed, and the inferior quality material meant potholes reopened at the first sight of rain. There are other interesting procurement aspects too. As The Times reported, investigators ‘believe that the man behind the firm set up front companies to allow corrupt officials to pick a different winner to successive tenders to give the appearance of legality’. That’s clever, because of course the same firm winning this sort of contract over and over again would eventually arouse suspicion.

So how can we guard against this sort of behaviour? In terms of checking quality of supply, you would hope that a good procurement organisation would be doing some sort of quality checks on the actual material. And not just asking the supplier to send a sample, but going out and looking at what was actually being used and doing some ‘live’ product sampling. 

In terms of avoiding the bribery aspect, there are a number of risk management options here. Not keeping procurement people in the same job for too long to make it harder for them to develop corrupt relationships with suppliers is one. Making sure multiple people are involved with supplier selection decisions and indeed in ongoing supplier management is another.

However, even that might not be enough if you have an organisation that becomes corrupted endemically. We saw in the case of the Fat Leonard / US Navy scandal, when you get to the point where even those who are supposed to investigate whistleblower complaints have been bribed themselves by the supplier, corruption can expand and run unchecked for some considerable time. So investigators will want to look at just how many Roman officials were corrupt. Was it just one or two – or was this a case where the rot spread more widely?

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 no-one notices, but it can be very effective.  The basic approach is that during the process to select a supplier or suppliers, a key person or people in the buying organisation make sure the specification favours strongly one particular supplier that they want to win the contract.

It is by definition a fraud that requires internal involvement, although often the supplier that wins the contract will be aware of it. Indeed, usually the supplier will be paying some sort of bribe or ‘thankyou’ to their internal accomplice(s). But sometimes, the supplier who benefits is not aware of what is going on, and sometimes the internal protagonist might not even get anything personally out of it. They may even feel they are doing the right thing for the organisation – “I know that Smith and Co are the best firm to do this consulting work, so I just want to make sure nothing goes wrong in the procurement process and they do win it”.

But I would argue this is still corruption if the specification is maniplated away from what would be the ‘best’ for the buying organistion, even if that is ‘just’ corruption of the process rather than corruption for personal gain. Bidding firms often spot this. They will read a specification and think “that has been written to favour our main competitor”.  Often they don’t bid on that basis, and the level of competition is reduced.  There have been many allegations of this practice in the defence sector for example over the years, and this is from the Bad Buying book.

One case where corruption was allegedly involved is the long-running saga of the Indian government helicopter contract with AgustaWestland, worth some $466 million. India terminated the contract after accusations that the firm – owned by Finmeccanica of Italy – bribed officials. The Indian government said in 2014 they “terminated with immediate effect the agreement that was signed with AgustaWestland International Ltd (AWIL) on 8 February 2010 for the supply of 12 VVIP/VIP helicopters on grounds of breach of the pre-contract integrity pact and the agreement by AWIL.”

The allegations surrounded manipulation of the specifications, with suggestions that the company had used middle-men to bribe Indian officials to win the 2010 contract. The allegation was that a defence ministry specification insisting its new helicopters should be capable of flying at 6,000 metres altitude was cut to benefit AgustaWestland’.

Actually one of the worst examples I saw of this was when a consultant was repeatedly used by local authorities to help develop the specification for a particular fairly specialist service – he often worked on the procurement as well. Oddly enough, his specifications always seemed to favour one particular supplier, the same one that the consultant regularly worked for in the periods between his work on the buy-side! All the other suppliers knew this and generally didn’t bother bidding if they saw he was involved with the procurement.

Another interesting example popped up recently. The State of Oklahoma in the USA decided to give all its schoolkids a copy of the Bible. But rather oddly, the specification included the requirement that the bible must also include certain US historical documents, such as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Funnily enough, the only version of the Bible that has these additions is what is known as the “God bless the USA bible”, produced with the endorsement of Donald Trump for which he gets a cut of the revenue. It’s a luxury item, bound in leather and sells for the ridiculous amount of $60. A standard bible can be acquired for a fraction of that.

Critics alleged that Oklahoma leaders are keen Trump supporters and deliberately manipulated the specification. However, whether or not that was true, there was good news this week. The state amended its request for 55,000 school Bibles, so other versions can be state approved. The request was altered, removing some of those onerous requirements, a victory for “good buying”!  

So remember how important a good and fair specification is, and if you want a strong competition, try and make sure it isn’t too obviously tilted in favour of one bidder. Unless you want it to be, of course …

(Footnote – you might expect me as a Humanist to be against forcing kids to read the Bible. But actually, I cannot think of anything more likely to make young people feel negative about religion and maybe help them make up their own minds about their beliefs and how they want to live their lives!)

After writing last week about competence in UK local government, as if by magic, a case of alleged fraud in a council very close to my home popped into view the other day.

Now several of my local councils haven’t been doing very well in recent years in terms of looking after taxpayers money. The Tory council in Surrey Heath, where I live, now ousted by the LibDems, bought well over £100 million worth of commercial property in Camberley right at the top of the market, and is now sitting on a loss in asset value of £50 million or so. Woking council, a few miles to the east, has basically gone bust after property deals and investments that make Surrey Heath’s look minor.

And now Guildford, to the south-east, has published a report into what is an alleged fraud and is at best a prime example of Bad Buying in its housing department. Two employees have been suspended and five agency workers had their contracts terminated.

The report to the Council by Jeanette McGarry of SOLACE, (the society of local government CEOs), is good but focused more on the governance issues rather than the procurement events. That may be because the matter is with the police now and an arrest was made in March, so precise details of the core issues may be sub judice.

But basically, a contractor working on the council’s housing stock was paid far more than the original contract value (which is not disputed) and also there was a possibility (as the report says),

  1. That work may have been ordered when it wasn’t necessary;
  2. That work may have been ordered, invoiced and paid for when it was not completed at all or;
  3. Not to a satisfactory standard;
  4. That duplicate invoices may have been submitted and paid for the same work;
  5. That works may have been ordered and undertaken that were not the responsibility of the Council.

Back in 2022, the council agreed to spend £24.5 to update its housing stock. But there were no in-house surveyors and doesn’t appear to have been much in the way of internal procurement either, as “Several agency staff were appointed and were able to appoint housing repair and maintenance contractors”.

A three-year contract for £2.4 million was agreed for EICR (electrical installation condition reports) testing and inspection to Seville Developments Ltd, “under direct award” via a framework. This was apparently achieved under the Council’s procurement process and “was found to be compliant”. I’d like to know more about how a direct award of that size could be acceptable, and if there was no competition within the framework, but the report does not go into that.

But the council realised in 2023 that expenditure had reached £18.9 million with Seville, with no authorisation or action taken such as contract variation. At this time, “the Corporate Procurement Team was staffed solely by temporary officers and there is evidence that an officer identified the unauthorised expenditure and raised this with the Housing client but did not escalate the matter”.  

Whistleblowing concerns were raised in 2023, and the staff suspensions and terminations took place in September 23, and in March 24 “An arrest was made by the South East Regional Organised Crime Unit”.

If we look at the anti-fraud measures outlined in my Bad Buying book, we can see a number of flaws in the Guildford process. There will I suspect be questions around the lack of transparency in supplier selection. Then we have the issues on signing off work – was that power too concentrated? Perhaps the biggest question is how on earth invoices that exceeded the contract value by £16 million got signed off and paid – that entire budget control process at Guildford must have been absolutely pathetic.

But an interesting point which is not one I really covered in the book is this dependence on contractors and temporary staff. To have a procurement team that is entirely “temporary officers” brings obvious dangers. It is not that contractors are necessarily crooks, but they cannot have the knowledge of the organisation and the internal relationships that are vital when things go wrong or strange events occur.

I also don’t understand why if Guildford was so short of staff, they didn’t call on Orbis for help. Orbis is the shared service organisation, hosted by Surrey County Council, that runs procurement for Surrey, East Sussex, and Brighton councils, and does a pretty good job. Surely they could have assisted Guildford if the council there couldn’t find its own procurement staff?

Anyway, another case study for “Bad Buying 2”!

As the results come in from local elections in England, it is clear that basically the country just wants the Conservative Party to go, the sooner the better. I don’t think there is huge enthusiasm for anyone else but most of the public are just sick of the infighting, incompetence and idiocy of the ruling party in recent years.

However, will changing our local councils make things better? A very interesting article in The Times   looked at data provided by a new agency, the Office for Local Government (Oflog). Ministers set up Oflog last summer to provide “authoritative and accessible” performance data to support improvement in local government.

The data looks at the efficiency and effectiveness of local councils across 27 categories in five main areas: waste management, corporate and finance, adult social care, planning and roads. It revealed for example that some councils have recycling rates that are twice as good as others and that some authorities are failing to process half of planning applications on time, while others are not late on a single one. The figures also show the extent to which many councils are struggling with debts, with six local authorities already having declared themselves bankrupt since 2021. That is certainly in part becuase of lower funding from the centre of government, but competence (or lack of) seems to come into play too in most cases.

The Times accessed all the data to look at variations, which are huge and pretty inexplicable other than by sheer management competence. For example, in the year to September 2022, Hinckley & Bosworth borough council in the East Midlands completed less than half of household planning applications on time. But Tamworth borough council, just 30 miles away, was not late on any.  

The Times also came up with league tables to see if there was any political correlation with performance. Nottingham (Labour controlled) was the worst performing authority. Torridge district council, on the north Devon coast, came top of the table – it is run by independent councillors.

But the results actually supported a theory I’ve held for years, suggesting it is not that the Conservatives (Tories) are generically better or worse than Labour in terms of competence (with the Lib Dems in the picture too in a smaller way). Of the ten worst-performing councils, six are controlled by Labour. Of the ten best-performing councils, six are in coalition or are run by independents, while the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives run two each.  Eight of the ten worst-performing county councils or rural unitary authorities are controlled by the Conservatives – while seven of the best-performing ten are in coalition or run by independents.

So what it does seem to show is that the worst-performing councils are almost always in areas, towns or cities where there has been a long-term dominant party, whether that is Labour or Tory. Conversely, the best-performing councils are generally more contested, so independents rule the roost, or no single party has a clear majority, or power has changed hands over recent years.

That stands to reason really. If there is a long-term dominant party, there is more scope for arrogance to creep into decision making, or fraud and corruption to spring up, and there is less scrutiny of decisions. “Bad buying”, whether it is just wasting money on frivolous or unnecessary spending, or more serious fraudulent or corrupt expenditure, is more likely where power is well entrenched. Take fraud for example. You are less likely to bribe a councillor, or to stand as a councillor yourself so you can influence planning decisions for nefarious purposes, if it is not clear who will be in charge after the next election.

Similarly, some of the arrogance we have seen in councils such as Woking, where the dominant Tory council invested hundreds of millions in unwise property deals, or in Nottingham, where the council (Labour in power since 1991, 50 of 55 councillors) thought it could run an energy firm better than the professionals, came about I’d suggest in part at least because the councillors thought they were unchallengeable and had complete power.  My own council, Surrey Heath, has also lost money – not as much as Woking though – on property deals put in place by a very arrogant Tory leadership. But last year for the first time ever the Lib Dems took power here.  

However, the correlation is far from perfect. Thurrock, where the council is now suing “businessman” Liam Kavanagh, who allegedly cheated the council out of over £100 million with dodgy solar farm investment schemes (hopefully the ex-finance head at the council will end up in court too), has actually had a few changes of council over the years.

But Liverpool is another example where single-party dominance led to a culture of corruption. Even after commissioners came in to run the City in 2021, the job description I saw for the Head of Procurement role still did not suggest a real appetite to put in place all the controls and governance you would want to see as a taxpayer!

Anyway, all this suggests that if your main interest as a voter is in the effective running of local services, rather than any deep political beliefs, you should aim to keep your local council and councillors on their toes by creating a competitive environment. How you can best do that will vary by area and even local electoral ward. But that seems the best strategy if you want your money to be used honestly and well.

Bad buying obviously covers every potentially sector and category, but I have had a long interest in professional services spend and procurement for many years, including as co-author of “Buying Professional Services”, my first published book.

A couple of recent stories highlighted that although most of the people working in that sector are highly educated and intelligent, they can still behave just as badly and even illegally as any petty criminal.

The first story was about a survey of lawyers run by the “rolllonfriday” website, anonymous of course given that 35.5% of the respondents admitted that at some point they have been guilty of adding time that hadn’t been incurred to their time sheets (which then means the invoices to clients are also inappropriately inflated). As the report said,

Thirteen percent admitted they did it regularly, 12.6% confessed to being “occasionally” culpable, while around 10% said it was something they had done, albeit “rarely”. 

Well, that probably won’t come as any surprise to most of us, but it was interesting to see our suspicions as cynical buyers confirmed. It reinforces the view that whenever possible, engaging professional service providers on some sort of fixed fee, outcome, output or success based basis is better than a simple “time and materials “ hourly or daily rate.

However, it can be difficult in the world of law, because we often don’t know just how much work will arise from a particular assignment, particularly if other parties are involved (litigation for instance). So it is hard for the parties to arrive at a sensible view of risk, which you need in order to agree a fair fixed price.

You should always look for where you can define some sort of clear work package and agree a price for that, but one thing buyers can also do is challenge their provider if bills look “padded”.  Many people feel nervous about actually digging into a statement and saying to their lawyer, “so did you really spend 30 minutes on that two-line email”?

Now they are unlikely to immediately back down and reduce that bill, but next time, they might just think “perhaps I’ll just put 20 minutes for this email” because they know you will challenge. So don’t be scared to be a nuisance and analyse billing carefully.

The second piece of news was even more shocking. Consulting and auditing firm KPMG was fined  in  the Netherlands for endemic cheating around professional examinations taken by their staff. As the Times reported, “The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in the United States found that between 2017 and 2022 hundreds of KPMG workers in the Netherlands, including senior partners and managers, had shared questions and answers with one another. This included for exams that they had to sit to test their understanding of professional ethics”.

Cheating on an ethics test! You have to laugh really. But I don’t understand why it is the US regulator doing the fining though rather than the Dutch equivalent.  

To make it worse, KPMG lied to the investigators, saying they knew nothing at senior levels about the answer sharing – but it turned out two board members had indulged in these activities themselves! A $150,000 fine was also imposed on Marc Hogeboom, who used to run KPMG’s Dutch audit division, and he was banned for life from working for any firm that audits American public companies.

These people are auditing public companies and giving investors confidence (or otherwise) in those businesses – so having the right skills and training is critical beyond just KPMG’s own operations. The cheating means there may be incompetent people doing important work, which is not a good thought, and of course it means buyers have paid for people whose qualifications (which largely determine the level of fee paid) were bogus. Maybe some big clients should sue the firm now.

It seems that it isn’t the first time this has happened and KPMG is not the only firm that has transgressed. Last week the American regulator also fined Deloitte’s businesses in the Philippines and Indonesia $1 million each for answer-sharing on professional tests. And two years ago EY was fined $100 million by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, because a “significant number” of its American auditors cheated on the ethics component of their Certified Public Accountant exams.

The lack of ethics and morals of those involved is quite shocking for supposed “professionals”. Whilst the latest fine was substantial, it does not seem to be enough really to reflect the seriousness of the crime. I think it would have been appropriate to ban KPMG from all audit work in the Netherlands for a few years. I also think maybe a few jail sentences for the most senior people involved might have made others sit up and take notice.

So the advice to procurement people is this. As with the lawyers, don’t necessarily believe everything your consultants or auditors tell you, or everything they put on the invoice, just because you think they are ethical and trustworthy professionals. Not all seem to fit that description.

Coming back to the Post Office Horizon scandal, last week at the long-running enquiry into the events, Fujitsu finally apologised and owned up to their contribution to the terrible events. The firm has now promised to make substantial contributions to the payments which should go to the affected sub-postmasters shortly, we hope.

As the BBC reported, “The boss of Fujitsu’s European arm says it has “clearly let society down, and the sub-postmasters down” for its role in the Post Office scandal.

Paul Patterson admitted there were “bugs, errors and defects” with the Horizon software “right from the very start”.  Mr Patterson also reiterated the firm’s apology for its part in the scandal.

Some of the Post Office staff involved in prosecuting the sub-postmasters came over at the enquiry as being both stupid and vindictive, enjoying their role as the “bad guys”. Clearly, the Post Office saw a role for nasty, vicious people in this case.

Then, in the Sunday Times today, Robert Colvile has written an excellent article about the history of the Horizon software. I was also surprised and pleased to find that he quoted from my book, Bad Buying, within his article. He reviewed the book (pretty positively) when it came out in 2020.  My quote is nothing to do with Horizon though – Colvile uses another story of mine to demonstrate general issues with contract management in the public sector.

But he makes a connection that I had missed (and I should have spotted). Horizon started with an ICL project, “Pathway”,  working with the then Department of Social Security back in the 1990s to automate benefits payment. I was actually Procurement Director at the DSS for part of the time this pretty lousy programme was running! But I had not realised it morphed into Horizon, and along the way the failing ICL got acquired by Fujitsu.  

When I joined the DSS, in 1995, I was not exactly welcomed by the people running that programme. I was struggling to get any traction with the programme leadership. So I asked my boss whether I should push harder to get involved. “Do you have plenty of other things to do”, he asked me. Yes, I replied, loads of stuff. “In that case, I think I would leave that programme alone”, he advised. He knew it was a dog and was saving me from failure by association.

That was when the Minister Peter Lilley stood up at the Tory Party conference and showed off the “benefits payment card”. It wasn’t real of course – there never was a working benefits payments card. His was mocked up in his hotel suite the night before by his aides, I was told.

I followed the Horizon case from the beginning and I thought I wrote about it on Spend Matters many years ago but I can’t find the article now, so maybe I just thought about covering the case. I do remember my internal debate about whether to include the story in my Bad Buying book, but it was complex, unfinished and subject to ongoing legal action, so I decided not to, unfortunately perhaps. Although I don’t think my book would have had any effect compared to the TV programme.

Let’s just hope now that the compensation gets sorted out quickly for those affected. And I’ll come back to another issue which Colvile comments on, the question of why Fujitsu has continued to win government contracts since the Horizon affair became public. That takes us into some interesting questions about public procurement regulations, so I’ll save that for another day.

This story from the Homeland Security Today website dates from a couple of months ago, but it is an interesting procurement fraud case, as it does not involve any internal participants – it is a purely supplier-based fraud. Whilst that is certainly far from unique, it is probably not as common as those driven by internal staff or through collusion between internal and external players.

In this case, Cory Collin Fitzgerald Sanders, age 39, of Hagerstown, Maryland, was sentenced to 45 months in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release, for wire fraud, false claims, and making and using a false document in connection with his companies’ performance on federal contracts. He also had to pay around $200,000 in fines and restitution.

The offences related to his two telecoms firms between 2015 and 2020.  The charges were pretty wide ranging but generally related to contracts with federal agencies that required his firms, Sandtech or Cycorp Technologies, to provide new telecommunications equipment which was still under manufacturers’ warranty. 

He contracted to supply new equipment, but then actually provided second hand, or non-warranted equipment instead. He claimed to have accreditation from the OEMs (original manufacturers) that would protect his customers when in fact he didn’t. He also was not authorized to provide certain IT services to the federal government, but represented to government officials that he was. It sounds like he invoiced in a fraudulent manner too, getting the agencies to pay for “deficient or non-existent performance”.

“Mr. Sanders deserves to be held fully accountable for his actions to defraud the U.S. Government by routinely providing telecommunications equipment that did not meet contract specifications and submitting false documentation in an attempt to cover up his scheme,” said Special Agent in Charge Greg Gross. 

The US government does seem pretty hot on prosecuting dodgy suppliers, more so than I’ve seen generally in the UK, for instance. In this case, a prison sentence of 45 months again feels more severe than “white collar criminals” tend to get in the UK. That’s a good disincentive for others who might be tempted to commit fraud, of course.

So what can procurement people and others do to protect their organisations against this sort of fraud? There are a few potential risk mitigation steps.  Firstly, checking out the credentials of any new supplier (and their directors) is important. And take up references wherever possible. Maybe that would not have stopped Sanders – but it certainly makes it harder to create new firms for fraudulent purposes.

Another obvious point is that goods delivered, whatever they are, should be checked to make sure they align with what was contracted for. And don’t assume that any accreditations and certifications are genuine – documents and emails can be forged. It is better to go back to the source if you can  – you could go back down the supply chain and check with the OEM that a distributor really is properly accredited, for instance.

So the usual safeguards against procurement fraud come into play again – and you can get the full list of mitigating actions and plenty of good advice on avoiding fraud and corruption in the Bad Buying book of course!

The UK’s National Health Service has for years been a “good” source of Bad Buying fraud and corruption stories.  There are several reasons for that. Firstly, it is huge organisation, employing some 1.3 million people. Secondly, it actually has a pretty good counter-fraud unit, and when fraudsters are discovered, they are often prosecuted, so the news becomes public domain, whereas private sector firms often hush up embarrassing cases. But it has to be said – the cases I’ve seen over the years often also suggest that too many NHS organisations have very weak policies and processes around procurement and payments.

The latest case reported in the media recently saw Thomas Elrick, 56, jailed for 3 years and 8 months.  He was assistant managing director for planned and unscheduled care at Harrow Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) where he had the authority to approve invoices up to £50,000. That organisation is a purchaser rather than a direct provider of healthcare – so it buys services from providers on behalf of the local citizens. 

Elrick created a company, Tree of Andre Therapy Services Limited, using the name of his husband (who knew nothing about it) as the owner, and invoiced the Trust for services that were never provided. Between August 2018 and December 2020 he authorised payments totalling £564,484. To cover his tracks, he also sent an email from the account of his dead wife which claimed to show details of patients the firm had “treated”.

Elrick spent over £100,000 on holidays to Dubai, Hong Kong, the Maldives, Singapore and Switzerland, and also spent just under half a million on shopping, with Amazon, Apple and David Lloyd gyms. But eventually a smart colleague decided to look up the Care Quality Commission accreditation for this firm and found of course that it did not have one, and then the connection to Elrick was found.

There is an interesting angle here in terms of his response. In a statement after he was sentenced, Elrick said “I wish I could turn back the clock but I know that I cannot and I sincerely apologise…  I am not a bad person. I believe that I am fundamentally a good person who made bad decisions, for which I take sole responsibility.” 

Self-delusion is an amazing thing, isn’t it?  I stole half a million from the NHS but I am “fundamentally a good person”.  The mind of a fraudster is often interesting, I suspect.   

But we have to ask how on earth this fraud was possible?  In my Bad Buying book, I give seven key anti-fraud precautions every organisation should follow and this case study and organisation broke several of them. There was no check on the onboarding of a substantial new supplier, which had no trading record, no CCG listing and a conflict of interest in the ownership (although that might not have been easily spotted). There was no check apparently that services paid for were actually received; and of course most fundamentally one person could conduct the whole pseudo-procurement process and authorise payment of large invoices without anyone else being involved or approving the spend. “Separation of duties” and all that.

This was not a sophisticated fraud. It was enabled by an incredibly weak process that was wide open for exploitation by anyone with a modicum of intelligence (and a lack of morals).  Personally, I would fire the CFO and the Procurement Director at the Trust for allowing this money to be stolen so easily.  But this is the case in so many organisations and so often – basic precautions against fraud are simply not put in place. Is it ignorance, laziness, or maybe a management team that wants to leave the door open just in case they want to do something dodgy themselves? Who knows.

The US Government Department of Justice recently issued a news release.  

Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation has agreed to pay the United States $377,453,150 to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by improperly billing commercial and international costs to its government contracts. Booz Allen, which is headquartered in McLean, Virginia, provides a range of management, consulting, and engineering services to the Government, as well as commercial and international customers”.

I do love the precision of the final $150 on that number! Couldn’t they have rounded it slightly?

The accusation was that between 2011 and 2021, the consulting firm charged costs to its government contracts and subcontracts that should instead have been billed to its commercial and international contracts. That particularly applied to some indirect costs. So the government was allegedly paying for activities and services that had nothing to do with the work the firm was actually doing for government organisations.

Now allocating overheads can be a tricky issue, as many of us know. And Booz Allen issued a statement, as you might expect.

“Booz Allen has always believed it acted lawfully and responsibly. It decided to settle this civil inquiry for pragmatic business reasons to avoid the delay, uncertainty, and expense of protracted litigation. The company did not want to engage in what likely would have been a years-long court fight with its largest client, the U.S. government, on an immensely complex matter. The company fully cooperated with the government and is pleased to move forward.”

So there is no admitting liability or guilt here. I can understand why the firm does not want a long, expensive fight – on the other hand, if you were 100% sure of your position, many firms would choose to take it further rather than handing over quite such a large amount of cash.

The most amazing element of this story is this. The investigation was sparked by a whistleblower, a former Booz Allen employee, Sarah Feinberg, who tipped off the authorities about the alleged misconduct from 2011 to 2021. And now she will receive no less than $69,828,832 as a thanks (it’s that precision again…)  

$69.8 million!  Good grief, I’m going to have a good think now about every firm I’ve ever worked for and whether they might have done anything “naughty” in their dealings with the US government …  

The moral of thee story is simple. Check your billing from professional service firms. I once took on a senior interim commercial/procurement role in government with an organisation that had around 100 consultants from one firm working on its major programme. That was £500K A WEEK we were paying this firm (it better be nameless…)  

I took a look at the invoices – incredibly there was no contract manager for this contract – and found that amongst other things, we were being billed for the senior partner’s assistant. The partner was only working about a day a week on our project, but we appeared to be paying a grand a day, every day, for his PA. We were also billed for the whole day for the whole team when I knew they had stopped work at lunchtime for their office Christmas Party! “An unfortunate error” I was told.  I saved £50K with one phone call there…

Of course, if you can structure any professional services assignment on a fixed price basis, most of these issues are avoided. That approach is usually – although not always – better for the buyer and actually arguably for the provider too. That is another question in this Booz Allen example. Why was so much government work being done on what sounds like a pretty loose “time and materials” basis?