A company that makes steel for Navy ships let a tester change results so weak steel looked like it passed. It is paying about $10.9 million. The fix behind it is simple, and it protects any small shop: never let one person be the only eyes on a test.
A quiet word with a competitor about who wins which job feels like cooperation. It is a federal antitrust crime. Bid rigging and collusion carry criminal penalties, and a dedicated government strike force is built to find them.
A federal IT contractor and its owner agreed to pay $4.8 million after allegedly paying fees to 8(a) firms to win set-aside work, then doing nearly all the work themselves while telling the government the small firms would. It is a textbook pass-through, and the owner paid personally.
When an audit or investigation looms, the instinct to clean up a file is a catastrophic one. Deleting an email or backdating a document can be a separate federal felony that is easier to prove than the underlying issue and far harder to survive.
A government contracting official was charged after allegedly approving invoices that funneled money back to a side business he profited from, aided by a contractor program manager. The case is a stark lesson in how an undisclosed financial interest becomes a federal crime.
A whistleblower suit can sit under court seal for years while the government investigates you in secret. Understanding the seal, the first-to-file rule, and the public disclosure bar explains how these cases really unfold, and why the first honest mover wins.
Overstate your staff, your experience, or your capabilities to win the award, and you can poison the entire contract. Fraud in the inducement means the government never got the bargain it agreed to, and every dollar paid can become a false claim.
You can commit a federal crime without stealing a dollar. Honest services fraud punishes the person who secretly sells out the loyalty they owe, through a bribe or an undisclosed conflict, and it reaches contractors and their insiders alike.
A major contractor agreed to pay $377 million, one of the largest procurement fraud settlements ever, over how it billed indirect costs to the government. The case is a plain warning about cost mischarging, and the whistleblower who started it collected nearly $70 million.
A single counterfeit microchip in a defense system can cost lives and end a company. For many contractors, the law does not just punish knowingly selling fakes, it requires a system to detect and avoid them, and makes the cost of failure your own.
