Case Study: Why Is This Furniture Falling Apart?

Case Study: Why is this Furniture Falling Apart? After a decade of complaints from customers of the General Service Administration (GSA), “the government’s housekeeping agency”, speculation began to arise that corruption was involved, particularly in regards to a New Jersey furniture manufacturer by the name of Art Metal, USA (Wells, 2014). The inferior quality of the furniture was so bad that desks collapsed and chairs were known to come in with one leg shorter than the others. Yet, complaints to fix or replace defective products were ignored or brushed off. It was always a case of “You didn’t fill out the right form,” (Wells, 2014). After years of this style of conduct by GSA, it was clear that the behavior was not planning on changing anytime soon. The Washington Post ran a series of articles describing the situation on the practices of the GSA and eventually it led to the launch of a congressional investigation.
Identify the Corruption Scheme Involved This is a clear case of bribery. According to Wells (2014), “bribery is the offering, giving, receiving, or
GSA should have had a vendor list to monitor the prices they were paying against the market prices of other furniture vendors in the area. Even though Art Metal had an exclusive contract with GSA, the contract should have had a clause that poor quality and failure to meet standards at the agreed price unless renegotiated was cause for termination of the contract. Separation of duties in regards to the purchasing agent, inspecting agent and billing should have been instated with additional separated duties for someone to manage complaints in regards to the quality of the furniture. This could have mitigated the frustration of the employees using the furniture received by Art Metal and possibly raised attention to the matter quicker of a corruption scheme in