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!
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.
Paying a price that's too high with someone else's money, and getting a kickback for doing so, definitely a crime, no question.
That is a pretty obvious fraud.
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.
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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.
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
You did not want some one who may well be innocent doing something stupid.
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...
Now, if he'd restrained himself to the $4.4 million that no one actually knew about, then it really would have come down to an observant HR exec. But, of course, the kind of guy who pulls a scam like that probably doesn't know how to restraint himself.
Really, the only thing which could explain how someone could come up with something like that is pure complacency and foolish, short-term greed. Reality has a way of catching up with these games; it's not something anyone would want to get involved in otherwise.
Detection is probably difficult, and the agencies charged with investigating and prosecuting are likely over worked.
So, yah much there's much white collar crime going on, from a grand at a time to a few millions. I'm not surprised.
The only break you get is when one of the parties makes a mistake like using company networks to conspire or sours on the deal and rats everyone out. Then you get to roll them all up.
Also, using cut outs like family members or trusts create reasonable cause for doubt unless their is overwhelming evidence that the arrangement was fraudulent, no matter how obvious it seems on the face of it.
One bank had guys in the IT department work for a couple of months then quit, one after the other, apparetly after having stolen 'enough' money (whatever that means to a thief). Rinse and repeat, till their company got called in. That bank's systems were apparently that bad.
I always wondered whether it was that the bank had no proof of the theft or an image thing where they could not afford to go after them because customers would lose confidence in them.
Should be fine for those with tax returns that are simple enough to understand. Not so much for those that choose complicated financial structures.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_brib...
One other thing: These types of face-to-face, "close on a handshake" negotiations are really open to various types of fraud. I was thinking about this when listening to a friend discussing how he had negotiated a $12,000 discount for his child's base college tuition, by talking over the phone with someone in the college admissions office. Or a commercial real-estate deal that I participated in some years ago that involved several rounds of negotiation. If one or both sides of these transactions wanted to extract some financial benefit "on the side," it would be so easy to do it ... which leads me to believe it happens all the time, anti-fraud laws and signed declarations be damned.