Procurement Collusion Strike Force

The Procurement Collusion Strike Force (PCSF) leads a coordinated national response to combat antitrust crimes and related schemes in government procurement, grant, and program funding at all levels of government—Federal, state, and local. The PCSF is comprised of the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, multiple U.S. Attorneys’ Offices around the country, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Inspectors General for multiple Federal agencies.

Training: Strike Force attorneys and agents are available to provide training to other law enforcement agents, auditors, and procurement personnel to assist them in identifying and preventing collusion and fraud in the competitive bidding process.

Enforcement: If collusive conduct is discovered, the Strike Force stands ready to investigate and criminally prosecute the individuals and corporations seeking to unjustly profit from these tragedies.

Collusion and anticompetitive conduct that subvert the competitive bidding process include:

• Bid rigging: Two or more firms agree to bid in such a way that a designated firm submits the winning bid.
• Price fixing: Two or more competing sellers agree on what prices to charge, such as by agreeing that they will increase prices a certain amount or that they won't sell below a certain price.
• Customer or market allocation: Two or more firms agree to split up customers, such as by geographic area, to reduce or eliminate competition.

These agreements are generally secret, and the participants defraud customers by holding themselves out as competitors despite their agreement not to compete. They harm consumers and taxpayers by causing them to pay more for products and services and by depriving them of other byproducts of true competition. 

Initiatives: The PCSF has two targeted initiatives. The first is the Data Analytics Project, which the PCSF launched in 2020 to facilitate collaboration across the law enforcement community. The goal of this interagency collaboration is to develop and use data analytics to identify signs of potential collusion in government procurement data for further investigation. The second is PCSF: Global, which has three closely related goals: to deter misconduct impacting U.S. taxpayer dollars spent overseas, to generate and prosecute international cartel cases impacting U.S. government interests overseas, and to continue to strengthen relationships with key competition agencies around the world.

Related document: Preventing and Detecting Bid Rigging, Price Fixing, and Market Allocation in Post-Disaster Rebuilding Projects