🔗 linkedin.com/in/dr-lenora-s-3bb0093a

Research Focus: Public Procurement Governance • Policy Implementation • Anti-Corruption

“Corruption and Fraud in Public Sector Procurement in South Florida: An Examination of the Perceived Effectiveness of Policy and Enforcement”

What research challenge did your dissertation address?

Public procurement organizations have no reliable way to establish whether their own controls are actually working. They can demonstrate that policies exist, training was delivered, and audits were performed, but none of that answers the question a governing board is entitled to ask: are these rules constraining behavior, or producing documentation that describes a constraint which no longer exists? Across the 28 organizations I examined, comprehensive statutory frameworks coexisted with quantified irregularities exceeding $1.7 billion. My research supplies a five-dimension diagnostic framework, practitioner instruments, and an evidence-based reform agenda to help organizations diagnose their own control environment, before failure becomes visible in an audit report.

What inspired you to pursue this research?

Forty years in procurement, across public and private sectors, left me with a question I couldn’t answer from experience alone: why do capable, ethical professionals working inside well-designed systems still produce outcomes nobody intended? These organizations weren’t short of rules: they had competitive bidding ordinances, ethics codes, conflict-of-interest regimes, and audit functions, yet they still lost money in ways that surprised no one who worked there. The professionals closest to the process could often say in advance where the exposure sat; that knowledge simply had nowhere to go. I wanted to understand the mechanism, not catalog the failures auditors already document well, which meant asking the practitioners who operate the rules what they actually believe about them and taking those answers seriously as evidence.

What did your research find, and what is its impact?

The research produced two original concepts. The Compliance Paradox identifies a condition in which the volume and quality of procurement rules bears no reliable relationship to the integrity of outcomes, because the enforcement architecture behind them is perceived as hollow: 62 percent of professionals agreed procurement policies are well understood, while only 18 percent believed discipline is applied consistently regardless of position. The Whistleblower Paradox identifies its consequence: the professionals best placed to detect procurement fraud are those most exposed to retaliation for naming it, a fear present in all 22 interviews I conducted. The resulting Policy Effectiveness Assessment Framework converts both findings into something usable: measuring five dimensions of perceived effectiveness without presupposing failure, and identifying at least one mechanism practitioners regard as genuinely constraining. An organization can now diagnose its own control environment using instruments that require no consultant, no new system, and no legislative change.

“The professionals best placed to detect procurement fraud are those most exposed to retaliation for naming it.”

Lenora Sevillian