See, sometimes telling lies gets you in big trouble:
A construction company that completed work on part of U.S. 460 will pay $2.5 million for making false statements related to a federal contract that required the company to hire minority businesses for the job, U.S. Attorney Tom Bondurant said Monday. English Construction hired one black worker and “called him a company.”
Ouch! (Original story here.)
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Now that’s just dumb.
I’ll bet the same guys use inflatable dolls and mannequins to try to evade the HOV rules. Dimwits.
This is one of the more blatant examples of it, but the truth of the matter is that there is a lot of corruption associated with the federal contract set-asides for minority owned companies.
It’s not uncommon to find that the minority company, even when it is legit is really just a front for a company that wouldn’t otherwise qualify for the set aside programs.
Also, it’s not uncommon to see construction companies headed by women who just happen to be the wives of the man who does most of the actual physical work. By making the wife the nominal President and owner of the corporation, they qualify for federal government set asides.
It seems to be something everyone knows about but nobody ever talks about.
Thank you for pointing that out, Doug. I see this happening almost every day.
This used to be a big issue with federal spectrum licenses. Most of the incentives for minority/women-owned businesses have disappeared, though (in large part due to Supreme Court decisions, but also because of a general shift away from such priorities). What remains are small/medium-sized business incentives, which provides something of a diluted opportunity to the same folks, for the most part. It’s not a perfect replacement, but it does make it easier to filter out fraud like this.
Unfortunately, to directly address the farce that Doug is talking about, you’d probably end up excluding more women than really necessary, if you changed the attributable interest rules to bar any family members (i.e., husbands) from being involved with the business.
At one point, the MBE/WBE certifications required that the folks who headed the companies had the necessary skills themselves for the work in order for them to qualify as minority or woman owned. Those rules were aimed squarely at those figurehead-type entities. Has that changed?