Law360, New York (March 9, 2015, 10:22 AM EDT) -- Suppliers are caught in the middle of a new enforcement trend in federal, state and local investigations of disadvantaged business enterprise (DBE) fraud. Historically, DBE fraud investigations have focused on the relationships between DBE services or labor subcontractors and the prime or subcontractors with whom the DBEs contracted. The government enforcement agencies would allege that the DBE was a sham or "pass-through" because it was incapable of performing, or simply did not perform, the work for which it subcontracted to perform. Investigations of DBE subcontracting have led to a well-known list of fraudulent schemes including, for example, DBEs using the prime contractors' employees and equipment to perform the work or DBEs subcontracting all of the work to non-DBE firms....