Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Much has been written about corruption in developed countries, but very few studies have examined specifically at various types of public procurement fraud. While many cases of procurement fraud have been observed to take place between two individuals, there is evidence of more sophisticated schemes involving multiple actors. Based on the FBI database of public procurement corruption investigations, we utilized 183 cases from 2013 to 2017 to identify the prevalence and structure of bilateral and multilateral fraud arrangements. As expected, the majority of the cases in our dataset were bilateral in nature (67%), although there was also evidence of multilateral arrangements (33%). Through the use of case studies, we further examine the characteristics of these bilateral and multilateral schemes in order to make inferences about how each schemes is structured, the types of positions the implicated participants held, what motivated the participants, the industry/industries that most often fall victim to these schemes.