They only go to jail if the kickbacks are obvious. Most of the time it's promises of future employment or employment of federal worker's kids, spouses, family members, or the retaining of a firm they hold an interest in. There's so many ways around the direct illegal approaches.
It's even more straightforwardly illegal with government clients, where there is a presumption that the employer (the people) can't possibly be agreeing to a sweetener for the employee.
I'm not saying people don't get away with it but the US government is actually stricter than many/most companies about gifts/perks from organizations that the government is doing business with.
1. It's incredibly illegal for an agent of the government to do this, and people get fired and prosecuted for this.
2. It is possible to couch this in a revolving-door sort of arrangement - once the agent stops working for the government, they get a cushy job at the vendor. In theory, the vendor has no reason to hold up their end of the bargain, once the person they are bribing is out of office. In practice, that person can then leverage their government connections to smooth out future business deals... Which in itself is not illegal, and is convenient cover for the job.
All the time. Michael Kratsios, former Federal CTO, and prior close associate of Peter Thiel gives a contract to a Thiel portfolio company (Scale) for $92M while he's Federal CTO and also undersecretary of the DoD with a fairly opaque budget and procurement (something called a "broad agency announcement"). He retires as Federal CTO and surprise, he's now an executive at Scale. This is all in the open not even subject to innuendo or implication.
In the U.S. government. It happens some, but it totally illegal. It’s hard to get fired working for the U.S. government and this is one of the few ways you can get fired.
It's just as illegal there if you're a government employee. If you're an elected official, general principle still applies but rules are a bit different.
Yes, but there are controls in place to limit it, many large corps have similar controls the problems usually arise when you get unicorns which grow faster than they can build processes to account for stuff like this. I’m sure now Netflix will work on the issue, possibly this case started bec they began working on preventing stuff like it.
This does remind me of Deloitte winning a contract for building a website using technology only Deloitte could use [1]. Surprise, surprise: the website sucked.
there's a long road from "I'll buy from you but don't forget that I retire in 5 years' time, I hope there's a cushy job waiting for me" to "I'll buy from you, here's my bank account, make me a consultant wink wink"
Sole source contracts happen all of the time. Where it becomes murky is if the contracting officer ends up retiring his government job and takes a highly paid job with vendor.
