Not really. Auditors are accountants (or accountant adjacent) and have no clue about the technology. If the resesrcher says "we need it" then they have to take their word for it.
Source: 10 years on the side of companies selling custom widgets
Come on, at 200k a piece, that auditor is going to want to see at least 2 competing offers for that widget, which page-long explanations why the specific one was chosen.
And if you're going to argue nobody else is offering exactly that, a technologically literate auditor (read: external consultant) might show up when you try that the second or third time in as many years.
I'm going in the assumption that you don't have much experience with public procurement in scientific research.
1- Companies like Thermo, Agilent and all the others spend a long time developing "sole-source" documents. Effectively a list of BS specs that only they can achieve and/or offer. Sometimes it's a specific technology (e.g. "must be this patented tech because reasons" and pull out a bunch of references) or a specification. Like Thermo is infamous for "molecules per ion" with some of their mass specs. It's totally meaningless on a practical level and can't even be accurately assessed. But they made it up, and anytime a competitor tried to put down a better number the response is "prove it". The competitor can't. That's one way to ensure you'll win. It can also be buried in the main cost of the instrument, or listed as a critical upgrade, whatever.
2- you're giving waaaaay too much credit to the University or Research Institute evaluators. This has always worked, somehow or other, there's a way around the rules for a determined researcher to get their toy. Plus, if $200K is awarded for instrumentation, then $200K is precisely what the widget will cost.
You can argue with hypothetical "this is how they world should work", I'm speaking from a decade of experience of sitting in sales meetings with our rep shooting a number from the cuff that's high enough to make it worth his while to file an ROQ, but within the range to fly with procurement, and can be sole-sourced. Sometimes every year for 3 or 4 years, especially if the researcher is a star who consistently brings in grants.
Also, I don't know where you are, but if an external consultant is hired (LOL) they're probably already consulting the companies on getting around public procurement rules
I really only have experience from the research side. I've bought instruments and was audited.
I don't doubt that Thermo can argue their way out of a competing suppliers requirement. And for what it's worth, in my field there actually are suppliers that dominate the market because of the legit specs they can offer.
But a 1-man LLC, that also happens to be your instrumentation tech? 6 digits, every year, for 5, 10, 20 years in a row (because that's how long you're ideally want to keep a good tech)?
No way. You can do that twice, maybe three times. After that, you're standing in the lab, next to those three gadgets you bought, with an auditor and possibly an external consultant (and that guy is not working for Thermo, he's just a PI working in the same field as you do, having similar grants as you do, and the founding agency is paying him to be there for a couple of hours).
Universities do a lot of shady shit, with significant amounts of money. But "repurposing" 6-figure amounts of instrumentation investment every year needs significant amounts of criminal energy to pull off - or an LLC that actually provides some value by doing actual work.
If that instrumentation tech's LLC is doing stuff like pump maintenance, for example, the expenditure is much easier to explain. But doing something like that comes with lots of liability, compliance requirements, ect., and you better hope you never have a pump fail and ruin that $5M instrument...
>2- you're giving waaaaay too much credit to the University or Research Institute evaluators. This has always worked, somehow or other, there's a way around the rules for a determined researcher to get their toy. Plus, if $200K is awarded for instrumentation, then $200K is precisely what the widget will cost.
Not that there's no wiggle room, but the NIH and NSF had auditors, who then both send to field experts. They ask for photographs of the instrumentation, serial numbers, etc. Then my university has their own auditors, which do the same thing, including in-person visits and brief demonstrations, asset tags, and various other pieces of paperwork. Finally, the state itself has auditors which do also the same thing, although the state auditors would probably be pretty easy to pull the wool over their eyes.
Under $5000? Yeah it'd be trivial. But over $5000 is under quite a bit of scrutiny.
