Not fraudulently. Do not simply refuse to pay legitimate bills. Require documentation instead. A purchase order.
Preauthorization. A form. A documented approval. Then enforce those requirements strictly.
Apply them retroactively. Make no exceptions. Then wait. Because the arithmetic is brutally effective.
A small vendor is unlikely to spend an hour fighting over forty dollars. They cannot afford to. An hour of their time may be worth more than the invoice. So they complain privately.
They write off the forty dollars. Then they move on. Multiply that across 4,000 vendors over eighteen months. Suddenly the result is millions.
Real money. Recovered. Measurable. Defensible.
Every individual denial can be technically correct. There really was no purchase order. Nobody needs to lie. Nobody needs to steal.
Every individual decision can be justified. Then the total appears on a presentation slide under a beautiful title. Vendor Cost Recovery. $3.4 million annualized.
Tobin Reese was promoted twice on the strength of results like that. And this is where the tragedy begins. Nothing in his measurement system could show him what the savings cost. He could measure every dollar recovered with extraordinary precision.
But he had no mechanism, no metric, and no reporting category capable of showing what those vendors stopped doing. Because they did not quit. That was the frightening part. Not one of them quit.
The vendors continued fulfilling their contracts. Every contract remained in place. Every service-level agreement continued to be met. They simply stopped doing everything that was not written into those agreements.
To understand why that mattered, you have to understand what Vern Ashby actually did during an ordinary week. What he was paid for was scheduled servicing of ground support equipment. Defined equipment. Defined intervals.
Defined scope. Vern did all of it. Always. And he did it well.
Then there was everything else. Things that appeared in no contract anywhere. Vern bought small parts with his own money so equipment could run that same day instead of three weeks later. He came back in the evenings when he was not on the clock.