1. Including price escalation clauses in sales contracts but refusing to grant sales price decreases in the event of substantial downturns in costs
2. Artificially reducing the supply of a product or service to force an increase in price (or maintain an artificially high price) to customers
3. Acquiring raw material inputs in excessively high quantities to obtain a low price merely to generate a favorable variance for an individual manager or responsibility center (especially if that manager is primarily evaluated on the basis of price variances) while simultaneously ignoring the related non-value-added carrying costs related to the purchase
4. Engaging in cost avoidance by acquiring counterfeit goods at a lower price than their name-brand counterparts
5. Outsourcing production or procurement activities to companies that violate acceptable (as perceived from the firm’s domicile country) labor or environmental laws
6. Delaying payments to suppliers simply to generate larger investment returns on cash balances, especially when those suppliers do a high, or the highest, percentage of their business with the company
7. Manipulating or falsifying financial statements to obtain additional credit or lower interest rates on borrowings