I worked on the services side for many years and eventually worked my way into the sales and contract writing level of the operation. I was definitely too much of a square for anyone corrupt to want to pull me into their schemes, but I also never caught any kind of whiff of impropriety. We worked for a pretty wide array of clients including Fortune 50s and startups, contracts in the $500K-$20MM range. Never heard a whisper of kickbacks and we were typically squeezed to utilize every penny so it would be really, really hard to make more than 1% of our contract price disappear. The worst I ever saw was small-time expense abuse like buying steak dinners and wine on trips.
Second hand, an acquaintance worked on a tobacco account where they were spending government-mandated anti-smoking funds on a digital marketing campaign and they were asked to deliberate overbill and churn on work without delivering. People went to jail.
Third handed story because I knew some folks who used this software, a vendor once extracted about 1000% of their contract price in kickbacks building HR software for the city of new york: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/nyregion/three-men-senten...
Second hand, an acquaintance worked on a tobacco account where they were spending government-mandated anti-smoking funds on a digital marketing campaign and they were asked to deliberate overbill and churn on work without delivering. People went to jail.
Third handed story because I knew some folks who used this software, a vendor once extracted about 1000% of their contract price in kickbacks building HR software for the city of new york: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/nyregion/three-men-senten...