The story
Nothing in the construction business was visibly going wrong, which was what made it uncomfortable. Permits that ought to have taken time cleared faster than they should have. Approvals that usually attracted questions attracted none. And on tender after tender the same contractor came out ahead, at prices no one on the leadership team could quite explain.
Taken one at a time, each of these things had an innocent reading: good relationships with the authorities, an efficient vendor, a well-run project office. Taken together, they described a pattern that had started to feel suspiciously smooth, as though something were moving beneath the surface that the company could not see.
Leadership had a suspicion and nothing else. There was no complaint, no missing money and no document that proved anything. Asking the contractor to justify its pricing would only produce a justification. Asking staff how approvals were really being secured would warn whoever needed warning. Suspicion alone was not enough to act on, and acting on it clumsily could make things worse.
What the company needed was an independent view of two things it could not check for itself: what the work should actually cost in the open market, and how its approvals were really being obtained on the ground. It brought both questions to NARADism.
How we approached it
- 1
Built a discreet corporate identity
A pretext company, complete with its own website, was created so that the market could be approached as a genuine prospective client with no link back to the client.
- 2
Solicited genuine quotations
Using that identity, the team invited competing contractors to quote for comparable work, producing real market figures rather than estimates.
- 3
Benchmarked against the preferred vendor
Every figure gathered was set against what the client's preferred contractor had quoted, isolating the size and shape of the difference.
- 4
Ran parallel field enquiries
While the pricing work was under way, field investigators discreetly probed how approvals were really being secured on the ground.
- 5
Corroborated before reporting
Pricing evidence and field findings were cross-checked against each other so that the client received a single, corroborated picture.
The preferred contractor's pricing carried a mark-up inconsistent with the wider market. Set against genuine competing quotations, it was an artificially inflated bid.
The field enquiries explained the smooth approvals. Evidence pointed to payments quietly routed to secure regulatory approvals, alongside undisclosed liaisoning arrangements that the company had not known existed.
With corroborated evidence in hand, the client moved swiftly. It corrected its vendor panel, tightened its approval controls and shut down a liaisoning risk before it could escalate into a regulatory or reputational crisis.
Illustrative composite built from sector-typical fact patterns encountered in practice. Names, figures and timelines are indicative; no client is identifiable.