ABSTRACT
This chapter details many of the schemes contractors and vendors are known to commit after they are awarded contracts to get paid money they are not entitled to from buyers. During the American Civil War, some contractors on the Union side were involved in price-gouging and supplied defective bullets, guns, etc. Duplicate invoices are submitted with same or different invoice numbers. Vendors can inflate number of hours spent working on projects or assignment(s). In some schemes, contractors log labor hours for employees that never worked at the facility, no longer work at the facility, or are on vacation. Cost-mischarging schemes are some of the most difficult white-collar investigations to prove. Fictitious vendor fraud can occur in many ways. The simple version occurs when a shell company submits false invoices directly to the buyer for payment. Progress payment fraud occurs when contractors submit inflated claims for payment reflecting that they incurred greater costs in the production process than they actually did.
