Spent part of the trip in DC having breakfast with an old Iraq comrade. He's retired from the military now, and is doing pretty well for himself. Living in the DC area, though, a bit part of the accounts he deals with are government accounts. He was pretty good and mad about the system he's found there.
The graft is literally mandated by the government, my friend explains.
The way it works is that government contracts for services come with certain 'set asides' for women and minority-owned businesses. (Not, my friend points out, veteran-owned businesses.) Now let's say you're talking about businesses with significant capital costs. It turns out that there are only a handful (or fewer) of businesses that are really in the running, because only they have the capacity to perform the work. Nevertheless, they need to find 'partners' who fit these set-aside profiles.
So they do, and the way it works is that there is a front company owned by someone with the right profile. The real company forwards the appropriate front company, which slaps its letterhead on that paperwork and forwards it on. The government approves the work, the real company does the work, and the front company collects ten percent.
Everybody's happy. The company gets a fat contract, the front company collects money for nothing, and the practice is so common -- required by law! -- that the media take no notice of it. If news is man-bites-dog, this is the least newsworthy story of all.
...and the 10% grift is built into the REAL company's expense-side of the contract, sub rosa, of course.
ReplyDeleteSame game, different players: "minority-owned" firms are given preference at State and municipal levels too.
So Charlie Brown is a provider of X service or Y goods. He simply transfers 51% of his company to Susie Brown (his wife) and *ta-da*!! The "minority-owned" company gets the contract.
Susie gets a nice title, too.
It's certainly also human nature.
ReplyDeleteSomebody has to fund the Leftist war machine. Taxes aren't enough, in and of itself.
ReplyDeleteIt's not just in Iraq; we have the same system here. Even decades ago, my husband often ran into firms with space-program contracts they could land only by "partnering" with a business that had checked off the appropriate "minority owned" or "woman owned" boxes. Isn't that what redistributionist schemes are all basically about? It's social justice, son.
ReplyDeleteDid a spot of work at Marshall SFC in Huntsville, Ala. a few years ago. If you can set yourself up with a immigrant/minority/woman owned front you can sit back, push some papers, and let the cash roll in... AND if you try to find a way to pay the honest graff to get some work done internationally... you get nasty looks and told that The Government "doesn't do that"... ... ... ... ...
ReplyDeleteWilliam sends.