A Nevada man has admitted to rigging bids on Air Force facility projects worth more than $1.8 million, the Justice Department announced. According to the DOJ press release, Scott G. Srodes, 65, of Las Vegas, a former employee of a shelving and storage distributor, pleaded guilty to two felony counts for conspiring to rig bids and to defraud the United States in connection with the sale of products to the U.S. Air Force.
The Charges and the Scheme
Srodes and his co-conspirators submitted collusive bids for multiple projects at healthcare facilities at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, Georgia, and for aircraft-maintenance facilities at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada. Rather than competing independently, the participants coordinated their pricing in advance. According to the department, they exchanged pricing information before submitting their bids, at times instructing each other exactly what price to quote for certain projects.
That kind of coordination is the textbook definition of bid rigging. When competitors agree on who will win a contract and at what price, the government loses the benefit of genuine competition and ends up paying inflated costs. The projects at issue carried a total value of more than $1.8 million and were funded through the Defense Logistics Agency's Facilities Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO) program, which supplies the equipment and services that keep military installations running.
The case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, and Srodes entered his plea pursuant to a plea agreement. He has admitted guilt but has not yet been sentenced; a sentencing date and final penalty will be determined by the court.
The DLA MRO Program and Military-Facility Procurement
The Defense Logistics Agency's MRO program is a high-volume channel through which the military buys facility supplies and maintenance services, including the shelving and storage products at the center of this case. Because the program processes a steady stream of relatively routine purchases across many installations, it depends heavily on competitive quoting to keep prices honest. Buyers solicit multiple quotes and rely on the assumption that each vendor is bidding on its own. When suppliers secretly coordinate, that assumption collapses, and the procurement controls designed to protect taxpayers are quietly defeated from the inside.
Healthcare-related and base-maintenance projects make the harm especially concrete. The work covers facilities that support service members directly, and dollars siphoned off through collusion are dollars not spent on the mission. That theme runs through how the department has framed the prosecutions.
A Broader PCSF Investigation
The Srodes plea is the second guilty plea in an ongoing investigation into bid rigging and fraud affecting U.S. military facilities. The first came on March 18, 2026, when Eric J. Caddy of Huntington, Texas, a storage-company owner, pleaded guilty to two felony counts tied to collusive bids on healthcare-related projects at Moody Air Force Base. Those projects totaled more than $1.6 million and, like the Srodes projects, were funded through the DLA MRO program. In the Caddy matter, a co-conspirator instructed Caddy to submit intentionally higher prices and even supplied the specific figures to put on his bids — the same coordinated-quoting pattern at the heart of the Srodes case. The repetition of that mechanic across two separate defendants, two bases and a span of months underscores that investigators are working a connected network of suppliers rather than isolated bad actors, and the department has signaled the inquiry remains open.
The investigation is being run through the Procurement Collusion Strike Force (PCSF), the Justice Department's joint law-enforcement effort to combat antitrust crimes and related fraudulent schemes that impact government procurement, grants and program funding at the federal, state and local levels. The Antitrust Division's Washington Criminal Section is prosecuting, and the case was investigated by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, and the Defense Logistics Agency Office of Inspector General.
"America's warfighters deserve the best health care, and bid-rigging that distorts health care procurement deprives them of free and fair competition," said Daniel W. Glad, Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Criminal Enforcement of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division. U.S. Attorney William R. Keyes for the Middle District of Georgia added: "We will pursue and bring to justice those who cheat the federal procurement system, while we work to protect taxpayers and honest contractors from the harm caused by bid rigging."
Penalties
The maximum penalty for a conspiracy to rig bids in violation of the Sherman Act is 10 years in prison and a $1 million criminal fine for an individual. The maximum penalty for conspiracy to defraud the United States is five years in prison and a $250,000 criminal fine. These are statutory maximums, not the sentence Srodes will necessarily receive; the actual penalty is set by the court at sentencing, taking the plea agreement and sentencing guidelines into account.
What It Means for Contractors
For companies selling into federal facilities programs, this case is a reminder that antitrust exposure is not limited to large, headline contracts. The conduct here involved routine purchases of shelving and storage products under a maintenance program, yet it produced two felony pleas. Exchanging pricing with a competitor, agreeing who will win a solicitation, or telling another firm what to quote is criminal bid rigging regardless of the dollar size of the individual buy.
The practical compliance lessons are straightforward. Quotes should be prepared independently, with no sharing of prices, bid strategy, or "you take this one, I'll take the next" arrangements with competitors. Sales staff who interact with rival firms need training on where normal market contact ends and collusion begins. Contractors should treat any invitation to coordinate a bid as a red flag and document and decline it. And because the PCSF actively pairs antitrust prosecutors with agency inspectors general and investigators like AFOSI, DCIS and DLA OIG, schemes that once might have passed as ordinary quoting now draw federal criminal scrutiny. Robust internal controls and a credible antitrust compliance program are the cheapest insurance against becoming the next defendant in a multi-plea investigation.
