Rowena notices unusual characteristics in bidding documents: ten contracts awarded to the same contractor with unreasonably narrow specifications. Which procurement fraud scheme is most likely?

• A. An employee convinced their employer that it needs excessive or unnecessary products or services.
• B. A procurement employee drafted bid specifications to give unfair advantage to a certain contractor.
• C. A procurement employee broke up a large project into several small projects that fall below the mandatory bidding level.
• D. A procurement employee hid bids or otherwise restricts competition

Answer: (B)

When bid specifications are manipulated to give an unfair advantage to a specific contractor, it directly undermines fair competition. If ten contracts are all awarded to the same firm and the specifications are unreasonably narrow, the procurement official effectively crafted criteria that only that contractor could meet. That deliberate tailoring of requirements is a classic way to steer the procurement toward a chosen vendor, which is exactly the fraud described by drafting bid specs to benefit a particular contractor. The other scenarios describe different fraud patterns—over-stating needs, splitting work to dodge bidding, or hiding bids to limit competition—none of which capture the idea of intentionally shaping the specifications to favor one contractor.