Tag Archive for: Fraud

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The 2021 Bad Buying Awards – the Two Final Awards

Today, our final two Bad Buying awards for 2021!

Creative Fraud:  I-Tek, its Owner and Staff

Multiple Fraud Related to Imported Goods (and more…)

This case may seem relatively small compared  to  some of the mega-waste examples we have seen this year, but what made it a worthy winner was the way it combined three distinct types of procurement fraud in one rather neat package.

Beyung S. Kim, owner of Iris Kim Inc, also known as I-Tek, and his employees, Seung Kim, Dongjin Park, Chang You, Pyongkon Pak, and Li-Ling Tu, pleaded guilty to a procurement fraud scheme involving millions of dollars in government contracts over several years, mainly supplying various US defence agencies. They were sent to prison in August 2021, after providing everything from swimming trunks for West Point cadets to spools of concertina wire. The problem was that the goods were made in China, but were illegally re-labelled to look like US-made products. That violated the terms of the contracts as well as laws that stipulate certain contracts must be fulfilled by US-made products.

The second fraud came when investigators found that an employee who was a disabled military veteran was listed as the firm’s president in some bids – but he wasn’t. That meant the firm was eligible for contracts reserved for companies owned by disabled ex-service people. (We’ve seen a number of frauds of that nature in recent years, so of which are featured in my Bad buying book).  Finally, the conspirators also submitted false documents and lied about the value of the goods imported into the U.S. to avoid higher duties and taxes.

All in all, a pretty wide-ranging procurement fraud, covering several relatively common areas of illegal behaviour, adding up to an impressive winner of the Bad Buying Creative Fraud Award.

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Not Really Technology Award: Greensill Capital

Not an SCF FinTech, Just a Risky Lender (and Several Very Naughty Boys)

Greensill Capital, the firm built by Aussie farmer’s son Lex Greensill, collapsed in March, and the losses to investors who backed the firm are still unquantified but may run into billions. The UK taxpayer is also on the hook for state-backed loans and perhaps even pension support for steelworkers (because of Greensill’s close links with Liberty Steel).

Greensill presented itself as offering innovative tech-backed supply chain finance (SCF) products, but (to cut a long story short), their business model turned out to involve borrowing money cheaply by presenting the investment as low risk, then actually lending it out in a VERY risky manner.

Ultimately, it was lending money to the Gupta Liberty steel empire based on the “security” of vague future revenue flows that did for Greensill. Some of those revenues were supposedly going to come from firms that weren’t even current customers of Liberty!

This was not “supply chain finance” in the sense that any off us in the supply chain world had ever heard of before. It looked very much like unsecured lending with funds coming from sources (including Credit Suisse-promoted bonds) who were unaware of just how risky that lending really was.  Greensill also talked about being a “fintech” business, which they clearly weren’t, but dropping that bit of bulls**t into the conversation gave the firm more credibility. Their lending was facilitated through other genuine fintech-type platforms such as Taulia.  

Lex Greensill himself leveraged his role as a UK government “Crown Representative”, working to promote SCF within the Cabinet Office, to wheedle his way into winning some work in the public sector. He was supported for frankly incomprehensible reasons by a number of key people, including the late Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary. The various investigations showed that some senior procurement people and politicians were not taken in, including Minister Francis Maude, but Greensill got onto a Crown Commercial Service framework, and won contracts for offering NHS payments to pharmacies as well as “salary forwarding” to some NHS staff.  

Government’s Chief Commercial Officer at the time, Bill Crothers, initially didn’t seem keen but came round to the Greensill cause, and became a director of the firm, no doubt encouraged like ex-Prime Minister David Cameron by the prospects of making millions. Cameron’s behaviour has stained his reputation – such as it was – forever. Having left office, he harassed everyone he knew in government to promote Greensill’s cause, right through to 2020 when he tried to gain advantage for Greensill under pandemic financing and lending schemes.

We can’t call what happened “fraud” yet, although investigations that might lead to criminal charges are continuing. It is hard to believe that nothing criminal went on, but we will see. However, whatever it was, it fully deserves the Bad Buying Not Really Technology Award based on the scale, innovative nature and continuing implications of Greensill’s actions.  Indeed, if we had nominated an overall winner this year, I suspect Greensill would have won that ultimate accolade…

Happy New Year and let’s hope for less Bad Buying in 2022!

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The Bad Buying Awards 2021 – Part 1

Welcome everyone and yes, it is time for the inaugural Bad Buying Award Ceremony – virtual of course.  Over the next three days we will announce the six winners of these prestigious awards, given to those who have demonstrated truly Bad Buying.

Our definition of Bad Buying incorporates a number of different but linked topics. Obviously, it includes failure in procurement (poor performance on the buying side of the table). It can also relate to a contract that goes badly wrong because of supplier performance, failure or fraud that is not properly managed or mitigated by the buyer, client or customer. Or it can be a more general fraud linked to the procurement process, such as fake invoice scams or corrupt collusion between buyers and sellers.

So today, we will start with our two international awards.  

International (Private Sector): Kraft Heinz

Awarded for Creative Use of Supplier Contracts

Food giant Kraft Heinz (KH) was charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) with mis-stating its accounts following the merger of Kraft and Heinz in 2015. The firms said the deal would deliver cost savings of $1.5bn a year, and procurement savings-related targets were set for staff. But after 2017, savings proved hard to find,  As the SEC said, management “pushed procurement division employees to come up with ideas to generate additional immediate, same-year savings”.

The dodgy accounting practices were then based around manipulation of supplier-related payments. For instance, buyers negotiated “prebates” (!!) – a sugar supplier gave KH $2 million up front in return for a 3-year contract, with the agreement that the money would be recovered by the supplier through the contract. Or  suppliers might reduce prices in the short term in return for a longer-term increase. These schemes when recorded as current-year “savings” and added immediate profit, rather than being accounted for properly.

Kraft Heinz had to restate its accounts, correcting a total of $208m in wrongly-recognised cost savings. The CPO, Klaus Hoffman and the COO Eduardo Pelleissone were accused of violating anti-fraud provisions, failure to provide accurate information to accountants and violating accounting controls.

Without admitting or denying the allegations, in September Pelleissone agreed to pay a civil penalty of $300,000.  Rather than addressing risks after being made aware of issues, “he pressured the procurement division to deliver unrealistic savings targets”. Hofmann agreed to pay $100,000 and was barred from serving as director or officer of a public company for five years. KH agreed to a penalty of $62m, also without admitting or denying the findings.

This was a very interesting and unusual case, which demonstrated approaches that the judging panel had not previously seen in their many years of procurement service. Given that creative application of supplier negotiation and contractual mechanisms, this was a very worthy winner of the Bad Buying International (Private Sector) Award.

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International (Public sector): Balfour Beatty Plc

Awarded for Over-invoicing of US Defence Clients

In December 2021, the US housing management subsidiary of UK engineering and services firm Balfour Beatty agreed to pay fines and restitution of $65 million after admitting over-charging US defence clients for some years. Under the terms of the plea agreement, Balfour Beatty Communities agreed to make the payment  after a federal investigation into its scheme to claim performance bonuses by submitting false information to various clients. 

The issues came to light when living conditions at US Air Force bases were found to be unsatisfactory. The company’s homes did not meet fire safety codes and had mould, rodents, pests, radon gas, and other defects. An investigation then found that the firm maintained two sets of maintenance records at some bases. One included the issues of mould, asbestos, and leaks that were not promptly fixed, whilst the other showed fake quick repairs that allowed the company to claim contractual bonuses from the Pentagon.  As always in these cases, the company blamed a few rogue individuals who have presumably now left.  It also appears that the firm is still engaged on the contract which seems a little surprising.

In cases like this, it is arguably not so much “bad buying” as a “bad supplier”. However, where the issue runs for some time, it usually indicates a failure of contract management, as well as bad behaviour by the supplier. At least the client did eventually identify the issue and take action – but it is an interesting case study in supplier behaviour, and on that basis, Balfour Beatty and its affected clients win the Bad Buying International (Public Sector) Award.

Two more prize winners tomorrow!

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Theranos and FOMO as a Cause of Bad Buying

(Two posts in a row about blood – that’s a bit weird)!

Earlier this month, Elizabeth Holmes went on trial in San Jose, California, accused of six counts of fraud.  That relates to the blood-testing firm she founded and ran, Theranos, which was claimed to use unique technology to perform a range of tests with just a small sample of blood. The claims were later revealed to be largely nonsense and in some cases the results might even have proved misleading or dangerous to the user. When one of the Theranos laboratories was inspected in Newark, California, in November 2015, the inspectors concluded that “the deficient practices of the laboratory pose immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.”

The cautionary tale has been turned into a best-selling, award-winning and definitive book, Bad Blood by John Carreyrou and is going to be the subject of a film with Jennifer Lawrence playing Holmes.  But in real life, it seems that her defence during the trial may claim she was under the influence of her older and more experienced business partner and one-time boyfriend, Ramesh Balwani.  They may also claim that she really did believe in the product and it was others within the firm who misled her about the actual way it worked (or didn’t).

Although some experts warned from the early days of Theranos that there were questions to be answered about the product, Theranos raised hundreds of millions in investment from famous people such as Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch.  Perhaps they were dazzled by this confident, smart young blonde woman, who seemed to be particularly effective at persuading older men to stump up large investments!

But as well as the investment aspect to the story, there was also a Bad Buying link to the events. Here is how I described it in my book (“Bad Buying – How organizations waste billions through failure, fraud and f*ck-ups)”.

“Buying failure comes into this because the pharmacy chain Walgreens spent $140 million with Theranos over seven years, hosting around forty blood-testing centres in their stores. They got very little benefit from that and recovered some $30 million after a lawsuit and settlement following the eventual disclosure of the issues. Amazingly, as Bad Blood reports, Walgreens’s own laboratory consultant, Kevin Hunter, had seen early on that something wasn’t right with Theranos. But the executive in charge of the programme at Walgreens said that the firm should pursue the pilot because of the risk that CVS, their big competitor, would beat them to a Theranos deal.

Again, buyers wanted to believe that something was real, even in the face of mounting evidence that it wasn’t. This relates back to comments around believing the supplier– those earlier examples weren’t demonstrating fraudulent behaviour, but the principle is similar. It is easy for a naive or gullible buyer to be sucked into believing what the supplier wants them to believe.

Suppliers will take advantage of this tendency – whether it is the relatively innocent ‘Yes, we can install this new IT system in six months’ or the more dangerous ‘This equipment will find hidden bombs’. And FOMO – the fear of missing out to the competition – is something else suppliers will use, and that can lead to bad decisions. It’s not just physical goods, either. The top consulting firm selling its latest ‘strategy toolkit’ will mention that the potential client’s biggest rival is also very interested”.

So the message is – treat claims made by suppliers about their products with caution, maybe even with a touch of cynicism if they seem unique, outlandish or truly earth-shattering! And don’t let FOMO take you into the realms of Bad Buying.

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Look Who’s Talking – FACT360 AI Detects Potential Fraud

The fraud section in my new book was great fun to write. I know you can’t and shouldn’t call fraud “fun” in any sense, but the case studies I researched were interesting, and often quite astonishing.

In one case I saw personally (which I couldn’t mention in any detail in the book) we discovered a fairly senior colleague, who everybody thought was a lovely, capable person, was actually involved in approving six-figure invoices from a fake supplier. The police thought this “firm” was probably linked to the “Russian mafia”, and we only found out about the fraud when the police discovered this gang was receiving large payments from my firm (and told us)!

Anyway, buying-related frauds can involve just internal staff, as in the case of fiddling your expenses or using the company charge card wrongly, or can be purely externally driven, as in the case of many “invoice misdirection” cases, or might involve both internal and external players. That third category is perhaps the most common and includes classic frauds such as overpayments to suppliers or biased supplier selection in return for bribes or inducements to the buyer.

But technology, artificial intelligence in particular, is helping to pick up some frauds through its ability to analyse huge amounts of data and spot trends, patterns, inconsistencies and oddities. I remember a presentation from two or three years back which talked about using AI to search through corporate payments or approvals. The idea was that you might find for instance a budget holder who always submitted an invoice for approval or payment on a Friday afternoon, when it might be scrutinised less carefully! Or someone who always makes purchases with a value of £9,999 if the cut-off for approval is £10K.

But more recently, I learnt of another interesting approach. In this case, the AI focus is on emails and documents that flow within the organisation and to external third parties. It has been developed by a firm called FACT360, which is led by Paddy Lawton, who founded, ran and then sold spend analytics software firm Spend360 to Coupa in 2017. I spoke to Lawton and fellow director Andy Slater to get a quick overview of what they’re up to.

Of their three core products, AI Forensics  is most relevant to buying-related fraud work. It analyses documents and emails and produces a network “map” of who is talking to who within an organisation and across organisational boundaries, including to suppliers, for instance. It generates insights from that communication flows as well as from the content of the messages themselves.

So for example, if you apply the analysis to Enron’s data, before that firm’s crash and disgrace, you can see that one particular person was at the centre of a major web of communication within the firm, even though he wasn’t apparently very senior. It turned out he controlled one of the technology “marketplaces” that enabled Enron to falsely claim to be making money on transactions. This analysis of what FACT360 calls “prestige” can tell you a lot about what is going on within an organisation, and who is really important or powerful. 

“And there are subtle changes in communication behaviour that occur and can be detected when actors plan and engage in covert activity” according to Slater.

One of the interesting corruption cases in my Bad Buying book tells the story of the Sainsbury’s supermarket potato buyer, who conspired over some years with a major supplier to pay over the odds for potatoes in return for bribes. Might Fact360 artificial intelligence have picked this up?  Probably, says Slater. It is likely that emails between the main players would have been more frequent than for other similar suppliers, or show different patterns in terms of timing or even use of language. There might have been more obvious clues in the content too.

Of course, knowing that your email trail could be used in his way might discourage fraudsters from using that medium, but there is always going to be some record of contact, unless the participants are using real secret service tactics! And the beauty of these emerging AI technologies such as FACT360 is that the user doesn’t need to know or define what they are looking for – the system will highlight where it finds potential “unknown unknowns”, as Donald Rumsfeld famously put it. 

We’re still at the early stages of understanding just how AI is gong to affect our lives, and it may be that some implications will not be positive for many of us. But using it to detect and deter fraud and corruption in our organisations – and reduce Bad Buying – must be one of the more positive aspects of this fascinating technology.

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Bad Buying Reviewed in The Times – and Why “Sophisticated Frauds” Usually Aren’t

Bad Buying was published last week, and whilst there wasn’t exactly a rush of media appearances, it was reviewed in the Times on Saturday (behind the paywall unfortunately).

The reviewer (Robert Colvile) enjoyed it, although he found it annoying / depressing that governments seem to make the same mistakes time and time again when it comes to spending public money. Well, yes, I’d agree of course, that being one of my reasons for writing the book! He also picked up on one important point that is mentioned in the book but perhaps deserves more focus.  As Colville put it in his review,

“And the mistake was usually pretty elementary (as a rule, anyone who talks about how their organisation was victim to a “very sophisticated” gang of thieves is telling porky pies: far more likely is that there was a failure to attend to the absolute basics).”

This is so true. We see it almost every time there is a fraud case – the organisation that has lost out claims it is the cleverness of the fraudsters, not the stupidity of management that is to blame. That is the case even if all the fraudsters have done is phoned up the finance department and said “hello, this is IBM here, we’ve changed our bank details, please can you pay our outstanding invoices now to this new account”. Very sophisticated…

But it is  certainly not just the public sector that gets caught out. EssilorLuxottica, the worlds leading lens and eyewear firm, was the target of a 190 million euro ($213 million) fraud at one of its factories in Thailand. At the end of last year, the firm announced that it had fired employees associated with the incident (well, you would, wouldn’t you) and was looking to recover the money.

An intelligent guess would suggest that this was a “fake supplier” fraud, where money was paid under the authorisation of someone internally to external firms that were controlled by the fraudsters.  Those firms would not in reality be supplying anything to EssilorLuxottica of course, and by the  time the fraud was spotted, those bank accounts would have been closed and the cash long since extracted.  But this was a huge amount of money to disappear from a single factory in Thailand – it  sounds like it could be equivalent to the firm’s entire annual revenue in that country.

Assuming that was the nature of the fraud, how on earth could such large sums of money be extracted without anyone noticing? What were the policies in place and processes to check up on those new “suppliers” and their legitimacy? Who was allowed to approve high value payments?  Did the firm outsource any part of the payment process to a third party services provider? (That can sometimes lead to weaknesses in the process and less focus on what is going on).  Maybe there was some sophistication here in the fraud, but it really does smack of poor internal management and controls.

Anyway, that story is really told to demonstrate that it is not just the public sector that can waste money and fall down on basic anti-fraud processes. I’d suggest that every procurement or finance leader and every Board should consciously think about this question – “if I wanted to defraud my organisation, how would I do it”? 

Think  through the different options and potential points of weakness, and evaluate whether there are processes, checks or policies in place that would stop you getting away with it. If the answer is “no”, then either tighten up quickly or accept that you might be the next person waffling on to the press about “sophisticated criminals”!  Personally, I would also fire the CFO if such a basic fraud was committed on his or her watch.

The Bad Buying book might be useful too if you are concerned about these issues.  It contains seven key anti-fraud principles, with some practical and clear advice on how you can at the very least reduce the chances of fraud and corruption affecting your organisation.

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Health Minister in Zimbabwe Arrested Over Alleged PPE Procurement “Fraud”

All over the world, medical staff have struggled to find enough PPE (personal protective equipment) to meet their needs and protect themselves in a time of pandemic.  The problems have extended out and affected other users too, in care homes, local government, the police even.

That has led to some buying activities and processes that were far removed from the usual formal public procurement approaches. In the UK, we have seen huge orders placed with firms that normally would not have made it beyond the first basic company checks. Money was paid up-front in some cases, something else that would never happen in normal times.

We’ve been hesitant to call this Bad Buying  given the emergency situation, although at time of writing, there is some evidence that the UK may now have over-ordered at the top of the market and paid more than perhaps we needed to. But let’s reserve judgment on that for now.

But as well as issues of competence, there have also been accusations of bias, nepotism and even fraud. Sometimes those are far-fetched; the fact that the CEO of a small firm supplying PPE once attended a Conservative Party charity dinner should not mean his firm can never be a government supplier again!

In some countries however, the issue has gone much further. Recently, the BBC reported on the arrest of the Zimbabwean Health Minister, Obadiah Moyo, as “the government came under pressure from the opposition and on social media over a scandal surrounding the procurement of coronavirus tests and equipment”.

Moyo faces charges related to a $20 million contract for PPE and other virus-related kit awarded to a firm registered in Hungary, allegedly made without going through the proper procurement processes.  The company, Drax Consult, was only registered two months before the contract award, and the firm’s representative in Zimbabwe, Delish Nguwaya, has also been arrested. Africa News reported that “local journalists exposed how Moyo allegedly chose the company to sell medical supplies to the government at inflated prices that included face masks for $28 each”.

The President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, has made much of his anti-corruption drive but one of his sons was forced to issue a statement denying a link to the company after pictures emerged of Nguwaya with the president, his wife and sons at several events. Meanwhile doctors and nurses have been on strike demanding to be paid in US dollars as inflation is running at over 750% and incomes are virtually worthless in this struggling nation.

Coming back to the UK, the recent controversial government contract for market research (running focus groups) actually seems to me more dubious than most of the PPE buying activity. Giving a firm with “conflict of interest” type links to adviser Dominic Cummings and Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove a contract for almost £1 million with no competition simply seems wrong. The “urgency” claim made in that case does not hold water really when a quick competition could have been run in days. But at the moment, the British people don’t seem inclined to riot in the streets or start arresting Ministers.

That’s because corruption in public life is not perceived as a big issue in the UK, unlike in Zimbabwe. That is probably a reasonable stance today; but my fear is whether the public would notice or care if matters started getting worse.  The situation can decline rapidly, and once corruption becomes embedded, it is devilishly difficult to root out. Corruption is not the only cause of Zimbabwe’s decline in recent years, but it is certainly one driver of the economic woes the country has experienced.  So, even in nice, apparently honest western democracies, we need to “stay alert”, as somebody told us recently … 

(And of course there is much more about fraud and corruption in procurement in my new book,  “Bad Buying – How Organizations Waste Billions Through Failures, Frauds and F*ck-ups”, available to pre-order now).

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Fraud and Corruption – Sack the CFO!

Unfortunately, fraud and corruption are common in the business world, including in many large and well-known firms, as well as in governments the world over. Literally every day you could find a new story breaking that highlights an event of that nature, whether it is thousands of pounds, dollars or euros or millions involved. 

Issues related to ‘buying’, in its widest sense, probably represent the single biggest category of fraud and corruption globally. It is not hard to see why. When we consider fraud, it is clear that criminals trying to make money need to focus on where that money is. And buying (procurement) transactions account for most of the major spend areas for businesses and government bodies.

There are alternative ways you might look to extract money illegally or improperly from corporations, such as blackmail, or banking and investment frauds. There is some non-buying-related fraud committed by employees – we’ve seen examples of senior executives putting through pay rises for themselves that weren’t properly approved, for instance. But buying from third party suppliers accounts for trillions of dollars’ worth of trade annually around the world, so it is not surprising to see a whole range of fraud and corruption cases based around those processes.

Some of the low-level frauds are almost comical. The UK NHS suffered from a senior manager who extracted money by creating false suppliers, in order to fund her own activities as a horse breeder. The need to purchase expensive horse semen was a reason quoted in court to “justify” her criminal action.

However, without wishing to sound too sanctimonious, we do need to remember that there really are no victimless crimes, even in the seemingly light-hearted examples we see.  Taxpayers lose out when it comes to fraud related to government bodies, like the horse-related one. Even if the losses are covered by insurance for firms that are the victims, then insurance premiums will rise, or insurance-firm shareholders will take a hit. Someone always loses when a fraudster gains.

Perhaps the most annoying fact is that most buying-related fraud and corruption could be stopped by organisations taking a few relatively straightforward steps. Or where it can’t be easily stopped, and we’re talking about relatively minor frauds such as misuse of company credit cards, then it could be detected quickly.

Yet too often, the right processes aren’t in place, and we are left with a CFO after the event whining that “it was a very sophisticated fraud”. In 90% of cases, it wasn’t, the fraudsters simply exploited obvious vulnerabilities, and the CFO should be fired on the spot. If that happened a bit more regularly, we would see far fewer buying related frauds, that’s for sure!

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