re: New York blocks white-owned businesses from bidding on $2.3 billion airport renovation

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Here's the real kicker. Many of these MBE companies are simply shell companies, that get these contracts and then turn around subcontract the work to a white owned companies and take 10-15% off the top. Many times they can bid and recieve these jobs without any competition because of their MBE status.

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And it's comical because they'll only have like 1 employee. Like how is a company with 1 employee going to do a job like that. Lol.

What Burger Bearcat said is so true. Huge racket. City of Atlanta and Dekalb County does this all the time. I sold a $4m material package to one of my clients who was a prime sub for a GC on a City of Atlanta parking deck project. After getting the PO, they called and told me we would have to invoice to an MBE I had never heard of and we would need to set up an account for that company. It was a black female who had no industry credit recerences. We could only qualify her company for a $25k limit. My client had to sign a guarantee that they would pay the invoices which they planned on anyway. We would send the invoices to the shell company and she would send them to my client for review since they were actually providing material and labor. Then they would pay the bills because she basically didn’t even exist as a viable business capable of doing a project that size in our industry. She was required to perform a minimal amount of actual work (I think they poured and placed one section of the slab on grade) and had a crew on loan from a more established and long time Atlanta MBE contractor. But she had connections and probably made a couple hundred thousand on that project and never paid a dime for any of the labor or material.