The Fall Guy

When the supplier handed over a video of me accepting a $450 kickback to the company, Procurement Director Travis Lee’s face crumpled—anguish and disbelief written in every line. The timing was almost surgical: the audit results had barely landed before the evidence arrived, as if someone had planned the whole thing down to the minute. I’d always thought of Travis as a tough but fair manager, someone I could almost trust in this cutthroat world. Now, seeing him look at me like I was both a stranger and a disappointment, it hit harder than I expected.

The air in the conference room was stifling, thick with a tension you could practically taste. The AC was set too low, making the back of my neck prickle with cold sweat. The sharp scent of burnt coffee drifted from a forgotten mug near the window, and every so often, someone shuffled papers or clicked a pen, the small sounds magnified in the silence. Travis’s eyes flickered between me and the compliance team, his jaw clenched so tight it looked painful. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, somehow making the room feel even smaller.

"Seriously, Blake, how could you let this happen? For a $450 kickback, you made the company eat a $30,000 loss? What the hell were you thinking?"

His voice wavered between shock and exasperation, like a parent who’s finally lost patience with a kid who keeps screwing up. I could feel the silent verdict from the rest of the team—everyone suddenly fascinated by their coffee cups, some people nervously tapping their pens, others shifting in their chairs or glancing at their phones as if a Slack message might save them.

They pulled off the oldest trick in the book.

I’d seen plenty of shady deals in my time, but this one had a kind of cold efficiency. The classic shell game, only now the cards were spreadsheets and the sleight of hand happened over email. If it wasn’t my career on the line, I might have admired how cleanly they’d pulled it off.

The extra $30,000 the company paid ended up in his pocket, and then he secretly filmed me taking $450 so I could be the one to take the fall?

It was almost poetic, in a twisted way. A little part of me couldn’t help but feel a grudging admiration for the sheer audacity—while most of me simmered with resentment and betrayal. I was the fall guy, thrown under the bus in a move so slick it almost deserved applause. I tried to steady my breathing, clenching my fists under the table, palms sweating as I fought to keep my face neutral.

1

The company’s internal review found that last year, the price I paid for 500 sets of handheld detectors was way above market rate.

The news hit the office like a tornado—papers shuffled, whispers bounced around the open-plan workspace, Slack and Teams notifications pinged nonstop, and the tension was thick enough to chew on. People started avoiding eye contact, suddenly glued to their screens or pretending to take urgent calls.

That afternoon, the supplier came to the company with evidence that I had accepted kickbacks and reported me.

He walked in with a swagger I’d never seen before, his tailored suit crisp, tie perfectly knotted, and a cocky little half-smile like he’d already won. He shook hands with security, his grip firm, eyes scanning the lobby like he owned the place. Security waved him through without a second glance—unusual, but word must have spread fast.

The evidence was a video file—crystal clear, the kind of thing you see in a courtroom drama.

On the screen, every detail popped: the creaky office chairs, a battered Starbucks mug on my desk, a wall covered in a mosaic of neon Post-it notes, even the nervous tapping of my fingers on the keyboard. There was no mistaking who was in that video.

After all my years in procurement, this was the first time I’d seen a supplier win an order and then turn around and report the buyer for taking kickbacks.

Usually, there was an unspoken code—if one of us went down, we all did. This was a whole new level of betrayal, like flipping the board in the middle of the game.

In the video, the supplier’s sales manager handed me a wad of cash. The conversation was damning: