The FBI raided the offices of public sector IT contractor Carahsoft on Sept. 24, 2024. The raid of Carahsoft’s Reston, Va. headquarters appears linked to allegations that the major federal contractor had for years violated a cornerstone law that makes it illegal to arrange agreements between competitors to control prices for services provided to the government.
Carahsoft is under investigation alongside SAP, Accenture and other firms for allegedly violating the False Claims Act, which involved efforts to defraud government agencies for years. Frustration has mounted among DOJ lawyers, who claimed in court proceedings that the government’s document requests and inquiries appeared to be delayed or unfulfilled by Carahsoft. For more than a year, Carahsoft has not fulfilled requests to produce transaction records (including but not limited to the communications, solicitations, proposals, quotes, bids, award notices, orders, purchase orders, and invoices) for even a single project for the Justice Department and others involved.
According to Jay Holland, the Justice Department may have reached a tipping point in its investigation and decided the best course of action was to raid the company to preserve evidence. False Claims Act investigations vary case by case, but if a raid was launched, he said, it’s a sign that a significant amount of investigative work was carried out prior to that. “They’re not going to start out by raiding companies headquarters,” Holland said. The DOJ “would have done a significant amount of investigation … and determined that the gravity of the case warranted it.”
Read “FBI’s Carahsoft raid tied to years of price fixing allegations with other vendors” on the Nextgov/FCW website.
