A longtime state employee is accusing Missouri officials in a new lawsuit of subverting competitive bidding laws in order to steer lucrative technology contracts to a well-connected company, then demoting him when he raised red flags.
In a lawsuit filed earlier this month in Cole County against the Missouri Office of Administration, Rodney Rice alleges “deliberate bias” toward St. Louis-based World Wide Technology in awarding state IT contracts.
World Wide Technology is one of the largest privately-held companies in the country. It was founded by David Steward, a prolific Missouri political donor who has contributed $2.3 million to mostly Republican campaigns over the last decade.
The company has been paid $53 million by the state over the last two years.
The state gave World Wide Technology numerous unfair advantages over its competitors, Rice alleges in his lawsuit, violating state procurement law and exposing the state to potential liability if anyone found out.
When he brought his concerns to his supervisors, Rice says he was admonished for being an “obstructionist” and demoted.
Rebecca Morrison, a spokeswoman for World Wide Technology, said in an emailed statement that the company “is committed to a fair procurement process and upholds the highest ethical standards.”
The Office of Administration said in an emailed statement Monday afternoon that that while it would not comment on the specific allegations, the agency "looks forward to the opportunity to respond to these allegations through the legal process" and is "confident that the facts will reflect our commitment to fairness and transparency, including our lawful procurement and employment practices."
After 20 years in state government, Rice says in his lawsuit that he was appointed in March 2023 as director of the Enterprise Project Management Office, which oversees various IT projects and the contractors to whom they are awarded.
Rice believed one of his key responsibilities in the new role was to “ensure that the various agencies in state government followed the state’s procurement regulations and procedures to ensure well-connected vendors did not receive an unfair advantage over their competitors.”
Shortly after taking the job, he says he “began to suspect a deliberate bias toward (World Wide Technology) in the state’s IT contracts.” Specifically, the lawsuit says Rice grew concerned when he realized a former World Wide Technology employee was leading the State Data Center, which awarded numerous projects to the company.
World Wide Technology won “a majority of the state’s ‘infrastructure’ contracts even in cases where it did not submit the lowest bid,” Rice alleges. “In fact, (the company) had been awarded one contract even though it had submitted the highest bid, which was millions of dollars more than the bids from other approved vendors.”
Though Missouri has rules permitting the selection of “clearly inferior bids,” the lawsuit states, “none of those rules had been followed in the case of (World Wide Technology).”
Rice says his concerns were heightened when he learned the state provided a current employee of World Wide Technology key card access to an office in the Truman State Office Building in Jefferson City, a privilege he says no other vendors are provided.
He later learned the state was using World Wide Technology contractors to work on the preparation of a new project that had not yet been put out to bid, “which would give (World Wide Technology) an unfair advantage in the bidding process.”
He first raised his concerns in January 2024, the lawsuit says, and was told by a superior that the state’s IT infrastructure was “not sufficiently decentralized and could be irreparably destroyed in the event of a catastrophic failure.”
“To prevent the legislature and the public from learning just how vulnerable the state’s computer networks were,” Rice alleges, state leaders decided to bend procurement rules to award World Wide Technology the project “to ensure that the system was updated as quickly as possible.”
A month later, Rice says World Wide Technology was allowed to change the terms of a project after it had already been sent out to vendors for competitive bids. World Wide Technology would be paid for time and materials regardless of whether it met benchmarks laid out in the project proposal that was previously provided to its competitors.
Concerned that awarding the contract to World Wide Technology based on “far more favorable terms” would likely violate state law, Rice says he spoke to the Office of Administration’s legal department for advice.
He says he was advised by the agency’s attorneys to stop the entire bid process and reissue a revised request to ensure that all vendors had a fair chance at winning the bid.
But that was later overruled by his supervisor, who Rice alleges told him to let the bid process proceed unabated without notice to the other vendors.
The next month, Rice says his supervisor informed him his department “has become too black and white when it comes to contracts and many IT leaders see us as an obstruction and slow them down.” He was given a choice of accepting demotion or being placed on a performance improvement plan, which he understood would have led to his dismissal “after sufficient time to paper his file.”
Calling the decision a “Hobson choice,” Rice says he “accepted” a demotion and a pay cut on April 16, 2024.
Rice’s lawsuit alleges he was punished for “disclosing violations of state procurement law, regulation and policy that exposed the State of Missouri to potential liability in the tens of millions of dollars.”
This story has been updated with comments from the Missouri Office of Administration.
This story was originally published by the Missouri Independent, part of the States Newsroom.
