Bids or Collusion?: Spotting When Suppliers Are Playing You, Not Competing

Procurement has enough drama without vendors turning into a cartel re-enactment of Ocean’s Eleven.

But here we are—trying to run an honest tender while suppliers pass around pricing sheets like it’s poker night.

This article is your crash course in bid rigging, a.k.a. “competitive theatre” with a criminal twist.

We’re diving into the classics—bid rotation, cover pricing, lookalike proposals—and showing you how to sniff out the smoke before you burn the budget.

1. The Greatest Hits of Bid Rigging

Let’s meet the usual suspects.

Bid Rotation

Imagine a group of suppliers taking turns “winning” contracts.

Last quarter, it was Vendor A. This time, it’s Vendor B. Next one’s Vendor C. Coincidence? Only if you believe in procurement astrology.

Red Flag: Patterned wins across similar projects, despite changing specs and geographies.
Fix: Shuffle up your criteria, change evaluators, and compare technical scoring across tenders.

Cover Pricing

This is where Supplier X submits a deliberately high bid just to make Supplier Y look like a genius.

It's like your friend applying to Harvard with a crayon résumé so you can feel good getting into state school.

Red Flag: Bids that are inexplicably uncompetitive or riddled with errors—but from otherwise competent vendors.
Fix: Require detailed justifications for pricing assumptions and flag bids with weak commercial logic.

Lookalike Proposals

You receive five bids. They’re eerily similar. Same typos. Same font. Same generic “Value Add” section that somehow praises your company’s “innovative logistics strategy,” even though you’re in the public health sector.

Red Flag: Copy-paste similarities in structure, wording, or even metadata across different vendor documents.
Fix: Use plagiarism detection tools and dig into authorship. Yes, even in procurement—welcome to CSI: Sourcing.