White-Collar Crime and the Public Sector: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Public Procurement Fraud

Procurement is a critical government activity, yet very little scholarly attention is devoted to procurement fraud in public policy, public management, or public financial management research. While many publications focus on the stages of the procurement process and appropriate protocols to follow for successful procurements, the opportunities for exploitation of the process have not been as widely studied. Procurement fraud is similarly understudied in the white-collar crime literature, where attention has primarily been placed on corporate crime or political corruption.
This book extends criminal justice and white-collar crime scholarship by using these literatures to frame public procurement fraud. Additionally, organizational behavior approaches are applied to public procurement fraud to explain possible motivations for this type of occupational crime. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to provide insights into the characteristics of individuals who abuse the procurement process for personal gain, and it offers some strategies for detecting and preventing further abuse. Original research is also presented and compares the offender-based and offense-based characteristics of the perpetrators of public procurement fraud with those of street and white-collar criminals. The intention of this book is to elevate the issue of public procurement fraud and to align it with criminal justice and white-collar crime scholarship.
“An excellent introduction to an important type of white-collar crime that has a major impact on the cost and quality of government services. Public procurement fraud has received all too little attention from researchers and the general public. Smith clearly explicates the nature of public procurement fraud, why it matters, how it is committed, and what can be done to control it.”

—Michael L. Benson, Professor of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, USA