Posted on 01/05/2020 5:47:45 AM PST by karpov
No excerpt from Bloomberg allowed, story here. A free article is Contractors Use Shell Games to Hide Owners, Cheat Taxpayers. The GAO report is Ongoing DOD Fraud Risk Assessment Efforts Should Include Contractor Ownership.
Really “Duped”, c’mon.
Duped ??? or willfully playing along with the game.
Payoff at the end of 20 years.
I use to work for an engineering firm. The principals used their wives to form a shell company... made wives owners, installed wives as CEO, directors, and upper management. Bid on contracts, won contracts, then secunded workforce from regular company.
It’s not new at all. The game has been played for a long time. And not just the DoD but all companies dealing with government contracts.
Exactly.
Meritocracies don’t have these problems.
Governments where cronyism is strong do.
The downside is being forced to team with an 8A company that merely meets the proper checkboxes, but really does nothing but piggyback and suck up contract dollars.
I was interviewed for a government job-fed. A panel interviewed. The black guys job was to open the door when the interview was over.
This has been going on for 40 years. Set you wife up at 51% owner of YOUR business and magically, it’s a “Woman-owned Business!” It’s amazing.
My friend has a Heating/Air company and when he started it he had his wife be the “owner” of the company so he can bid on government contracts
It allows you to check the “woman owned company” box on submissions
It is sad but that is how the world works.
Too many contracting officers are lazy, satisfied to just go through the motions to award and provide oversight of the contract. Every new contract requires a kick off meeting. Contracting officers frequently do that at their location, rather than at the contractor location. Then, they never make visits to the company location to check on quality and compliance with the contract. A short notice visit to the company will easily uncover much of this. I’ve only known a few contracting officers who have done this.
“””””My friend has a Heating/Air company and when he started it he had his wife be the “owner” of the company so he can bid on government contracts
It allows you to check the “woman owned company” box on submissions”””””””””””
It used to work that way.
I’ve been working on government construction projects for 40 years. Even though my wife technically owns 60% of the stock we cannot be a Woman Owned Business because she has her own job. The requirements are more stringent now, as it should be.
The ticket these days is to be an approved minority business. At some point I expect to see a lawsuit from a white guy like me identifying as a crippled black woman in order to be a minority business. Some people laugh when I say that but I believe it has real merit. If you can identify as anything these days then why not identify as a minority contractor?
Many, many times LARGER engineering firms would hire or sub out to, this shell, women owned company, to meet their own AA or 8A goals. For example if Jacobs wanted a $100 million airport expansion, they would need X% minority subs to get the contract.
Yo, David, Neil, The Pentagon is an inanimate object and is therefore incapable of being duped. Do some homework and get back to us with the name of the person at The Penty who got “duped”. I think you’ll find that he or she wasn’t duped at all but was part of the subterfuge.
He mostly bids on NJ State jobs and it does helps
His wife does the book keeping and doesn’t have another job outside the home.
That may work from the government client’s side, but in many states that type of arrangement would run afoul of the professional licensing board regulations. In my state, a person who is not a licensed engineer cannot own an engineering firm. Same goes for lawyers, CPAs, etc.
Sounds like members of congress,you never see a poor democrat there.
Suddenly here come a young man in Austin that sets himself up as a Women Black company, and gets a contract from D*ll to supply equipment to the state. He pulls almost all D*ll business in Texas from other vendors, so state purchasing can check off those two desirable boxes in their purchasing systems.
Turns out that he is *somebody’s* kid, that rents an office near our Austin office. One of our guys walks over ... nobody there, just a fax machine printing away visible through the glass door.
This game has been rigged in Texas for decades, and on the coasts for much longer. Only now it can be made “legal”.
And let's just say that Little Rock AR and Chicago IL shared a lot of similarities in state purchasing back then.
ding ding ding.....we have a winnah!
No idea how it worked as I wasn’t involved. But it DID work. I just rolled my eyes from afar.
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