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...
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...