Any major IT consultancy company. Especially those working for the government. But the modus operandus is standard even for small agencies. You get to bid for

Any major IT consultancy company. Especially those working for the government. But the modus operandus is standard even for small agencies. You get to bid for a project. If your bid is anywhere near realistic, there's no way you'll ever get it, because the competition will bid way, way lower. So you put in a bid that you know will never get the project completed and/or will reduce quality well below what will ever be acceptable. However, the contract will be full of loopholes that will allow you to get away with it. You know that once your in, and once the project is far enough along, the client will have no choice but to pay you extra to do what actually needed to be done in the first place. No, the client is not getting screwed. Especially when it comes to governments and major corporations, everyone knows this is going to happen. It's just impossible to get the project started for anywhere near the real price tag. But even on a smaller scale, for instance a web agency with a 20K project, if you put in an honest bid you'll either never get the job or be forced to build crap. From web shopping carts to bridges, people don't value good engineering and planning. Or at least not until they are confronted with the results of bad engineering and planning. So there's the original budget and there's reality, and an entire cult of rituals surrounding bridging the huge gap between the two. And it is this ritual in which people on both ends take a considerable percentage of the top, so all the decision makers are vested in keeping this ritual going despite all of the well publicized failures. If you are a contractor and you're not getting at least 50% more out of a gig than the original contract, you're not playing the game very well.