Procurement fraud operates differently than most executives imagine. Dramatic versions involve kickbacks, fake invoices, and criminal conspiracies. Common versions involve something quieter. Vendors charge more than market rates because no one with authority ever checks. Financier Worldwide research documented vendor costs inflated by 40 to 100 percent above market prices across emerging market investigations, with schemes running for years before detection.
Mobius Solutions built MobiSpend from direct experience with these patterns at Caribbean state enterprises. The platform inserts governance checkpoints between requisition and approval, designed to catch overbilling before it becomes routine.
Most vendor overbilling does not require criminal intent from anyone inside the organization. It requires only that employees stop questioning whether prices are reasonable.
Long-standing vendor relationships create this condition naturally. A vendor provides services for five years, then ten, then fifteen. Employees who joined after the relationship began have no memory of competitive pricing. Employees who remember the original terms have moved on or stopped caring. Over time, the vendor becomes the default, then the assumption, then the only option anyone considers.
Emergency purchase requests accelerate the pattern. When something breaks and needs immediate repair, procurement shortcuts seem reasonable. Skip the bidding process. Use a vendor already familiar with the systems. Approve the invoice quickly because operations cannot wait. Each emergency creates precedent for the next, until emergency spending becomes routine spending with emergency justifications.
Shiva Ramnarine, a Toronto-based finance executive, encountered these dynamics directly during his tenure as CFO at Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago in 2021 to 2023. One contract review revealed an external vendor billing $90 per hour for services. When auditors validated market rates, the actual price was $50 per hour. That single discovery saved $36 million.
“Vendors had been embedded in the organization for more than 20 years,” Shiva Ramnarine explained. “Think about those relationships. People responsible for raising purchase orders had become order-takers rather than critical evaluators. A vendor calls, says something needs to happen, and an employee raises a requisition without questioning whether the price is right or the service is necessary.”
MobiSpend did not emerge from abstract software development. Shiva Ramnarine began designing the governance framework in early 2024, drawing directly from patterns he observed while leading financial transformations across Caribbean state enterprises.
The timing reflected growing regional frustration. By mid-2024, CFOs and board members across Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Barbados were reporting the same complaint: procurement processes generated approvals but not accountability. Existing spend management tools, built primarily for North American and European enterprises, assumed institutional contexts and vendor markets that did not translate to Caribbean business environments.
Shiva Ramnarine spent months interviewing finance leaders and procurement officers about their vendor management challenges in 2024. The conversations revealed a consistent pattern: organizations had approval workflows that functioned mechanically while prices drifted upward year after year. Managers signed off on requisitions they had no independent basis to evaluate.
“Every CFO I spoke with described the same blind spot,” Ramnarine recalled. “They had controls on paper. Requisitions went through proper channels. Approvals happened at the right levels. But nobody in the chain had data to challenge whether the vendor’s price was reasonable or the service was actually necessary.”
Those interviews shaped MobiSpend’s core architecture. Rather than building another approval workflow, Mobius Solutions designed a platform that surfaces analytical context before managers make decisions.
Organizations believe their approval processes prevent overspending. A requisition goes to a manager. Managers review and approve. Purchases happen. Controls exist.
These controls assume the manager possesses information that managers rarely have. Does this price match market rates? Did we pay this amount last quarter, or has the vendor quietly increased fees? Is this service genuinely necessary, or did the vendor suggest it to generate revenue? Should this be under warranty from previous work?
Managers approve what subordinates present because managers lack independent data to challenge the presentation. When the person raising the requisition says this vendor at this price is correct, the manager has no basis to disagree. Approval becomes a formality rather than a checkpoint.
IMF research found that the most corrupt emerging market economies waste twice as much on procurement as the least corrupt ones. Procurement related to maintenance and repairs proves particularly susceptible because each situation appears unique, making cost comparisons difficult and inflated prices easier to justify.
Ramnarine’s experience at TSTT revealed $160 million in annualized wastage through this mechanism. Previous leadership had declared the organization “bare bones” with nothing left to cut. Systematic review proved otherwise.
“He said if you find savings, cut them. We are bare bones. There is nothing to find,” Ramnarine recalled. “And then there was $160 million in wastage, every year, embedded in what everyone had accepted as normal.”
MobiSpend addresses the information asymmetry that allows overbilling to persist. Rather than asking managers to evaluate prices they have no basis to assess, the platform provides data that enables genuine scrutiny.
When a requisition enters the system, MobiSpend surfaces relevant context through four analytical functions:
• Historical comparison shows what the organization paid for similar services previously, flagging price increases that lack justification
• Frequency analysis identifies services that shifted from annual to quarterly to monthly without corresponding changes in underlying need
• Vendor concentration highlights spending patterns where single vendors dominate categories that should have competitive alternatives
• Warranty and timing checks flag requests for repairs on recently serviced equipment that should still be covered
Sheldon Bowman, who now leads Mobius and the technology and digital transformation practice at Mobius Solutions, designed the system to ask questions that a skeptical CFO would ask but that busy managers cannot.
“AI plays the role of an objective committee asking tough questions,” Bowman explained. “Did you put a tender on this? Why did you select this vendor? Why are you requesting service at this price when the same service cost less six months ago? The system removes the personal element where an employee might hesitate to challenge a long-standing vendor relationship.”
Vendor overbilling often hides behind apparent savings. Bowman described a common scenario where a vendor announces that rates will increase from $10,000 to $15,000 monthly, but offers a 50 percent discount, bringing the new price to $12,500. Employees receiving this news believe they saved money. They actually approved a 25 percent price increase while feeling grateful.
“People come in and the first line says we saved 25 percent,” Bowman observed. “But year over year, you are paying 25 percent more. There is nothing in the value you receive for that additional cost. An AI will catch that. It will look at what you paid last year and what you will pay this year and flag the increase regardless of how the vendor framed it.”
License renewals present similar opportunities for inflation. A vendor says the organization needs 300 software licenses renewed annually. Such requests seem technical, the vendor seems authoritative, and employees raise requisitions without question. Simple verification of actual usage might reveal that only nine people logged into the software in the past three months.
MobiSpend joins MobiWork, which provides remote work oversight, and MobiStrategy, which tracks strategic plan execution, in the broader Mobius Solutions platform. All three address the same underlying problem from different angles.
Vendor overbilling persists because vendors and internal stakeholders control information about whether spending is necessary. Remote work dysfunction persists because employees control information about their own productivity. Plan execution failure persists because initiative owners control information about their own progress. Each Mobius platform creates independent verification where self-reporting previously dominated.
Transparency International research notes that public procurement accounts for substantial portions of GDP across economies, making it one of the highest-risk areas for corruption.
Mobius Solutions’ focus on restoring stakeholder trust through accountability treats procurement governance as financial governance. Organizations that cannot verify whether spending is necessary and fairly priced cannot claim financial discipline, regardless of what their approval processes suggest on paper. MobiSpend provides the verification layer that traditional approvals lack, transforming procurement from a trust-based process into an evidence-based one.
