mktresearcher
Junior Member
Colorado
I own a small business. In 2001, I was approached by a state government employee with whom my firm had been doing some projects, and that employee offered me the opportunity to rig a public bid. I declined, and reported the person to senior management in the organization. Several people in the organization already suspected it, and a criminal investigation was begun, in which I was a key witness.
However, partway through the investigation, it stopped cold, despite strong statements by at least three very credible witnesses. I suspect that it was because the corrupt person's boss was a friend of hers and had high-level political connections, but I can't confirm it.
The person that I turned in learned that we had turned her in, and immediately zeroed out the budgets on all of our contracts. She retired shortly thereafter (unsure if it was forced or not), but on her way out she hired a friend of hers to take her old position.
I should note that this position administers large amounts of grant money to organizations throughout the state, so the position holds quite a bit of informal power despite being a low-level position.
The friend, who I will refer to as Ms. Corruption, launched a war on my firm. My firm is well-respected in our field, and numerous people have informed me that she has said very negative things about the quality of our work, and has actively tried to force grant recipients to remove us from contracts and hire two firms that now receive virtually all contracts from her department. (I suspect that these two firms accepted an offer for bid-rigging, because one is highly unethical and the other is more or less incompetent. None of the contracts are publicly bid, because they are issued via stacks of purchase orders and/or subcontracts given to the firms by grant recipients.)
We have long remained silent on the issue, and the only contact we have had with this woman's department is to go to the head of the department and state that we viewed the incident as being over and we welcomed the opportunity to submit proposals on a fair basis in the future. We didn't even tell most people about the bid-rigging offer. (We were told not to discuss it during the year-long investigation.) However, even five years later, Ms. Corruption continues to say very negative things about our firm, and the pace has recently accelerated strongly.
Based on statements from grant recipients that we respect, a sample of her statements include:
1. She informed one prime contractor that we support that we did not properly design a project, and that we had inappropriately copied our work from a similar contract. We can absolutely prove that this is untrue.
2. We were selected via public bid to be a subcontractor on a project, and she informed our prime contractor that "it will take too long to hire [our firm], and that the prime contractor should use someone else."
3. We were selected by a private firm to conduct a project that was funded by a Ms. Corruption grant, and while we were waiting on the contract, it was suddenly signed by one of Ms. Corruption's favored firms. The prime informed us that Ms. Corruption had told them that we weren't as qualified to do the work as her firm, and she had them pull us off the project.
4. In a meeting with several of our clients, an employee of Ms. Corruption whom I've never met attempted to cut the budget on one of our grant-funded projects, stating that our work quality was poor.
5. One grant recipient was told that they needed to do more work in our area. The organization hired us. Ms. Corruption then cut their grant considerably. As I understand it, they were one of very few organizations to get a funding cut, and most of it came from my area.
At what point can we take legal action against this woman? She is severely damaging our business, and we strongly believe that it is continued retaliation against our ethical behavior and/or this woman is selling contracts herself. Most of the witnesses are reluctant to come forward formally because they fear having the same retaliation happen to them.
Am I considered a whistleblower? My challenge on that is that it appears that the state's whistleblower law protects only employees who come forward and not contractors.
What evidence do I need to pursue legal action against this woman? Can I send a private investigator in to pose as a grant applicant and record her comments? Would that be sufficient? I think I can easily gather recordings of her statements, and I could possibly get some witnesses to come forward, though most are scared. Would recordings of her statements to fake clients be sufficient grounds to pursue action? And are her statements technically illegal? We can easily prove that she is applying a different standard to our work than the work of the firms that she favors.
My bigger worry is that we recently won a large contract from another state agency that interacts with Ms. Corruption on a frequent basis. We were awarded the project via a public bidding process, and we just learned that they rescinded our contract award and gave it to another firm, despite their announcement that we had won the contract. We were told that "they changed their mind" after being initially told that we were clearly the most qualified firm. I fear that Ms. Corruption has extended her attack once again. We plan to protest the rescinsion and will try to have a frank conversation, but I'm not sure how that will turn out.
This is a very frustrating situation. We should have received a medal, and instead we're being slandered.
I own a small business. In 2001, I was approached by a state government employee with whom my firm had been doing some projects, and that employee offered me the opportunity to rig a public bid. I declined, and reported the person to senior management in the organization. Several people in the organization already suspected it, and a criminal investigation was begun, in which I was a key witness.
However, partway through the investigation, it stopped cold, despite strong statements by at least three very credible witnesses. I suspect that it was because the corrupt person's boss was a friend of hers and had high-level political connections, but I can't confirm it.
The person that I turned in learned that we had turned her in, and immediately zeroed out the budgets on all of our contracts. She retired shortly thereafter (unsure if it was forced or not), but on her way out she hired a friend of hers to take her old position.
I should note that this position administers large amounts of grant money to organizations throughout the state, so the position holds quite a bit of informal power despite being a low-level position.
The friend, who I will refer to as Ms. Corruption, launched a war on my firm. My firm is well-respected in our field, and numerous people have informed me that she has said very negative things about the quality of our work, and has actively tried to force grant recipients to remove us from contracts and hire two firms that now receive virtually all contracts from her department. (I suspect that these two firms accepted an offer for bid-rigging, because one is highly unethical and the other is more or less incompetent. None of the contracts are publicly bid, because they are issued via stacks of purchase orders and/or subcontracts given to the firms by grant recipients.)
We have long remained silent on the issue, and the only contact we have had with this woman's department is to go to the head of the department and state that we viewed the incident as being over and we welcomed the opportunity to submit proposals on a fair basis in the future. We didn't even tell most people about the bid-rigging offer. (We were told not to discuss it during the year-long investigation.) However, even five years later, Ms. Corruption continues to say very negative things about our firm, and the pace has recently accelerated strongly.
Based on statements from grant recipients that we respect, a sample of her statements include:
1. She informed one prime contractor that we support that we did not properly design a project, and that we had inappropriately copied our work from a similar contract. We can absolutely prove that this is untrue.
2. We were selected via public bid to be a subcontractor on a project, and she informed our prime contractor that "it will take too long to hire [our firm], and that the prime contractor should use someone else."
3. We were selected by a private firm to conduct a project that was funded by a Ms. Corruption grant, and while we were waiting on the contract, it was suddenly signed by one of Ms. Corruption's favored firms. The prime informed us that Ms. Corruption had told them that we weren't as qualified to do the work as her firm, and she had them pull us off the project.
4. In a meeting with several of our clients, an employee of Ms. Corruption whom I've never met attempted to cut the budget on one of our grant-funded projects, stating that our work quality was poor.
5. One grant recipient was told that they needed to do more work in our area. The organization hired us. Ms. Corruption then cut their grant considerably. As I understand it, they were one of very few organizations to get a funding cut, and most of it came from my area.
At what point can we take legal action against this woman? She is severely damaging our business, and we strongly believe that it is continued retaliation against our ethical behavior and/or this woman is selling contracts herself. Most of the witnesses are reluctant to come forward formally because they fear having the same retaliation happen to them.
Am I considered a whistleblower? My challenge on that is that it appears that the state's whistleblower law protects only employees who come forward and not contractors.
What evidence do I need to pursue legal action against this woman? Can I send a private investigator in to pose as a grant applicant and record her comments? Would that be sufficient? I think I can easily gather recordings of her statements, and I could possibly get some witnesses to come forward, though most are scared. Would recordings of her statements to fake clients be sufficient grounds to pursue action? And are her statements technically illegal? We can easily prove that she is applying a different standard to our work than the work of the firms that she favors.
My bigger worry is that we recently won a large contract from another state agency that interacts with Ms. Corruption on a frequent basis. We were awarded the project via a public bidding process, and we just learned that they rescinded our contract award and gave it to another firm, despite their announcement that we had won the contract. We were told that "they changed their mind" after being initially told that we were clearly the most qualified firm. I fear that Ms. Corruption has extended her attack once again. We plan to protest the rescinsion and will try to have a frank conversation, but I'm not sure how that will turn out.
This is a very frustrating situation. We should have received a medal, and instead we're being slandered.
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