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A guy I used to work with was fired for these types of bribes. This was like 20 years ago when I was just a 17 year old lowly tech IT nerd. They fired the guy

A guy I used to work with was fired for these types of bribes. This was like 20 years ago when I was just a 17 year old lowly tech IT nerd. They fired the guy and he was the entire IT guru for an office of about 120 people so I was flown down to Florida to try to size up what was happening. He went against corporate policy and was buying from and off-brand computer vendor because he was receiving bribes. He magically had two jet skiis one day and the company sort of put two and two together. It was a nightmare though... no one had the network passwords to the Netware server so I had to copy ALL the data to another box and then migrate everyone over to Windows NT... It was like 150GB of data back when a large HDD was 150MB... I think we had to split it up across multiple RAID arrays or something crazy. Took forever!

ChuckMcM 7y ago
I have similar examples in my experience. If you run operations it is something you need to watch out for because, in my experience, every vendor extends feelers to see if this is a possibility. It goes unnoticed by accounts receivable because the vendor marks the price up with the 'extra' so they see an invoice, and pay it and get the equipment, none the wiser that is some % higher than it "could" be. This is amplified by vendors of IT gear that quote a "high" MSRP, and then offer a big discount. So the vendor has rack switches for $4500 MSRP they are selling you for $3000 when the 'standard' discount would be $2500 (45 points off list). The accountant sees the 33% off list so they are happy, the vendor gets more than they need to make their margin, and the IT guy on the inside manages to pocket a few thousand that arrives via a side channel. Everyone gets a little something and everyone is happy as a clam. It is fairly insidious and difficult to combat unless you can pit distributors against each other or vendors in order to force out what their real bottom line is.
- yummypaint 7y ago
  This cancer has been finding its way into academic purchasing offices. Researchers could use procurement cards to buy what they needed with their grant money, now administrators are chipping away at this to force people to use shopping portals that directly enable this. It almost never saves money, and the extra time and delays associated with it probably cost money overall, yet its of critical importance to purchasing admins that everyone use this nonsense so they can get their kickbacks.
  - bgorman 7y ago
    How does using a shopping portal facilitate kickbacks?
    - extrapickles 7y ago
      The shopping portal vendor gives the kickbacks to the people that made it mandatory for everyone.
  - i_am_nomad 7y ago
    I can tell you that University of California is like this. It’s infuriating.
- Invictus0 7y ago
  Is this actually even a crime?
  - sujNansnam 7y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_bribery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_bribery TLDR: it’s a felony in most states. There’s no federal law prohibiting it explicitly but it often falls under mail or wire fraud.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    For real? That is a pretty obvious fraud.
  - ip26 7y ago
    Paying a price that's too high is not a crime. Paying a price that's too high with someone else's money, and getting a kickback for doing so, definitely a crime, no question.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
It is a common form of corporate fraud this was mentioned when few years back I did a "serious" course on Hr/Ir issues - serious as it will end up in court. One of the main take always was one of the main roles was to baby sit a manager (with the hr person) if one of his team was being investigated, to make shure they didn't do anything silly like resign
- kortilla 7y ago
  What was the reason for preventing the manager from resigning?
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    This was when their staff where the ones accused, our internal security had a terrifying rep. You did not want some one who may well be innocent doing something stupid.
specialist 7y ago
Now I wish we had a f*'ed company like site for sharing these stories. As @ilamount suggests, it may be way more common than anyone would guess. -- Early 90s, I was the computer kid for a very fast growing retail architecture group within a publicly traded company. Dept grew from 24 to 130 people during my time (just under 2 years). I was the scape goat for a failed budget & estimating tool. The shark in the national construction management role hired some goofy consultancy. The shark fired me when his consultants missed their big deadline. I was told that my failure delayed store openings and contributed to the company missing their projected earnings, causing the stock price to decline. Sure. That same shark was later busted for kickbacks from vendors, expensing family vacations, and so forth. His crimes were never disclosed. Probably signed an NDA and got severance package. Of course, I never got an apology. The sad part was that I had already created and deployed a nifty little budget & estimating tool during my spare time. The architects loved it. But I don't know how to manage upwards, so the hierarchy didn't understand the work had already been done. Maybe because my tool was "too simple", compared to the alternatives under consideration (eg integrating MicroStation with Primavera). My bigger mistake was being honest with the shark. He asked what I thought of his consultants, without telling me he had already hired them. I said something like "They're frauds. Any work they do for us will end up as lawsuits and tears." So the shark probably started engineering the blame shifting at that point.
aguyfromnb 7y ago
>He magically had two jet skiis one day and the company sort of put two and two together. Despite there being fraud in this case, there's something slightly disturbing about your employer analyzing the way you spend your money and assuming fraud...
- kortilla 7y ago
  Not employer, this is the type of thing noticed by coworkers.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

I have similar examples in my experience. If you run operations it is something you need to watch out for because, in my experience, every vendor extends feelers to see if this is a possibility. It goes unnoticed by accounts receivable because the vendor marks the price up with the 'extra' so they see an invoice, and pay it and get the equipment, none the wiser that is some % higher than it "could" be. This is amplified by vendors of IT gear that quote a "high" MSRP, and then offer a big discount. So the vendor has rack switches for $4500 MSRP they are selling you for $3000 when the 'standard' discount would be $2500 (45 points off list). The accountant sees the 33% off list so they are happy, the vendor gets more than they need to make their margin, and the IT guy on the inside manages to pocket a few thousand that arrives via a side channel. Everyone gets a little something and everyone is happy as a clam. It is fairly insidious and difficult to combat unless you can pit distributors against each other or vendors in order to force out what their real bottom line is.

yummypaint 7y ago
This cancer has been finding its way into academic purchasing offices. Researchers could use procurement cards to buy what they needed with their grant money, now administrators are chipping away at this to force people to use shopping portals that directly enable this. It almost never saves money, and the extra time and delays associated with it probably cost money overall, yet its of critical importance to purchasing admins that everyone use this nonsense so they can get their kickbacks.
- bgorman 7y ago
  How does using a shopping portal facilitate kickbacks?
  - extrapickles 7y ago
    The shopping portal vendor gives the kickbacks to the people that made it mandatory for everyone.
- i_am_nomad 7y ago
  I can tell you that University of California is like this. It’s infuriating.
Invictus0 7y ago
Is this actually even a crime?
- sujNansnam 7y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_bribery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_bribery TLDR: it’s a felony in most states. There’s no federal law prohibiting it explicitly but it often falls under mail or wire fraud.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  For real? That is a pretty obvious fraud.
- ip26 7y ago
  Paying a price that's too high is not a crime. Paying a price that's too high with someone else's money, and getting a kickback for doing so, definitely a crime, no question.

C1sc0cat 7y ago

It is a common form of corporate fraud this was mentioned when few years back I did a "serious" course on Hr/Ir issues - serious as it will end up in court. One of the main take always was one of the main roles was to baby sit a manager (with the hr person) if one of his team was being investigated, to make shure they didn't do anything silly like resign

kortilla 7y ago
What was the reason for preventing the manager from resigning?
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  This was when their staff where the ones accused, our internal security had a terrifying rep. You did not want some one who may well be innocent doing something stupid.

specialist 7y ago

Now I wish we had a f*'ed company like site for sharing these stories. As @ilamount suggests, it may be way more common than anyone would guess. -- Early 90s, I was the computer kid for a very fast growing retail architecture group within a publicly traded company. Dept grew from 24 to 130 people during my time (just under 2 years). I was the scape goat for a failed budget & estimating tool. The shark in the national construction management role hired some goofy consultancy. The shark fired me when his consultants missed their big deadline. I was told that my failure delayed store openings and contributed to the company missing their projected earnings, causing the stock price to decline. Sure. That same shark was later busted for kickbacks from vendors, expensing family vacations, and so forth. His crimes were never disclosed. Probably signed an NDA and got severance package. Of course, I never got an apology. The sad part was that I had already created and deployed a nifty little budget & estimating tool during my spare time. The architects loved it. But I don't know how to manage upwards, so the hierarchy didn't understand the work had already been done. Maybe because my tool was "too simple", compared to the alternatives under consideration (eg integrating MicroStation with Primavera). My bigger mistake was being honest with the shark. He asked what I thought of his consultants, without telling me he had already hired them. I said something like "They're frauds. Any work they do for us will end up as lawsuits and tears." So the shark probably started engineering the blame shifting at that point.

aguyfromnb 7y ago

>He magically had two jet skiis one day and the company sort of put two and two together. Despite there being fraud in this case, there's something slightly disturbing about your employer analyzing the way you spend your money and assuming fraud...

kortilla 7y ago
Not employer, this is the type of thing noticed by coworkers.