The New Corporate Crime Wave

With all of the criminal investigation efforts being focused on Bernie Madoff and other financial fraud mongers, most of corporate America seems to think it has a “get out of jail free” card with respect to its own criminal activity. What has been building for several years is now out there in full force. I don’t know if Gartner and/or Accenture are actually advising clients engage in this criminal activity or if it can simply be explained away as “only clients gullible enough to accept 4 color marketing literature those two were paid to pass out as ‘Independent Industry Analysis’ are gullible enough to think they can avoid going to prison while committing this crime.”

We have seen contracts posted for billing rates well below 1/3 of the actual going market rate for some time now. Usually the companies had a system in place which would allow pimps to present candidates at actual market rates, then have the manager manually reject them as being “too high”. While this was unethical, it was legal. The newest venture into time and cost savings is to install a system which physically will not let a pimp submit a candidate which is outside of your chosen rate range. The pimps have to sign an agreement saying they will abide by this application restriction. At this point, multiple crimes have been committed. If you live in Illinois you are used to hearing these two crimes talked about a lot…Price Fixing and Racketeering. I think we hold the international patent on both. We certainly have enough high profile trials putting people in prison for both.

There is a MAJOR difference between manually saying you won’t pay a price after a candidate has been entered into the system and having the system block all said candidates from entry. Anyone care to take a guess at one more place where that difference comes into play?

Once management decided they wanted to illegally use H1-B labor when there were hundreds, if not thousands of qualified U.S. Citizens around, they basically said they wanted to commit this other crime. Trouble is, if any evidence exists that qualified candidates actually existed and had applied, you can’t hire that $10/day person. What do you do Aurthur Andersen? Why shred the documents, of course! In this case, you deliberately block the documentation from being created. Now you can fill out that form for an H1-B and show them no qualified candidates existed for the position.

The additional crime is perjury. It happens on virtually every application justifying an H1-B visa and is a crime more widespread than the mortgage fraud. Thankfully, the only thing federal investigators need to do to make arrests is to find out which companies had a vendor management system which allowed for the blocking of higher priced submissions.