It's worth pointing out that a situation like this is often the endgame of anti-corruption rules. It always starts simple: you put in a rule, say, that a contr

It's worth pointing out that a situation like this is often the endgame of anti-corruption rules. It always starts simple: you put in a rule, say, that a contract can't be awarded to a contractor who has some relationship to the person making the decision. Then someone quite reasonably objects that a bureaucrat from a different department might try to influence the decision-maker to award to their friend for a kickback. So now you add a rule that there are multiple entities, ideally adversarial, involved who all have to agree before the contract gets awarded. Then you pile on yet more rules as people come up with ever more creative ways to get around them. And then one day you wake up and realize you have a literal maze of reports and applications and audits and inspections and committees that all have to be fulfilled for even the simplest project, and it's grown so complex that only a couple of companies put in the (extreme) effort of figuring out how to navigate it; everybody else has given up. Now those have a guaranteed lock on future contracts, and no longer have any incentive to be honest or control costs, since who else are you ever going to legally be able to give a contract to? Plus, the system is so complex that even the people in charge of it don't always know how to manage or enforce it. And then the costs start going up and up and up...