Key takeaways
Hiring managers bypass contingent workforce programs most often when the official process is slower and harder than the alternative — not out of deliberate circumvention.
Maverick spend creates hidden cost, compliance, and visibility risks that can surface in audits, classification questions, and incomplete workforce reporting.
Enforcement alone tends to create new workarounds; the programs that make real progress reduce friction and improve the hiring-manager experience.
Fast supplier response times are central to adoption — when the official channel delivers talent faster than the workaround, managers stop going around it.
Every contingent workforce program has the same invisible problem: the engagements that never enter the system.
The niche contractor a business unit found through LinkedIn. The SOW buried in a departmental budget line to avoid procurement scrutiny. The “consultant” who has been on-site for eight months with no formal classification because the hiring manager did not want to wait for the intake process.
In enterprise programs, this is called maverick spend. In practice, it is a risk sitting in a spreadsheet somewhere that nobody has looked at recently.
The technology is in place. The VMS is configured. The MSP is running. And hiring managers are still finding ways around it.
The question is why — and what it actually takes to fix it.
The process is the problem
Here is the uncomfortable truth most programs do not say out loud: when hiring managers bypass the official channel, it is usually because the official channel is slower and harder than the alternative.
Not always. Sometimes it is deliberate circumvention of rate cards or compliance requirements. But much of the time, it is basic rational behaviour. A manager needs someone to start in two weeks. The internal intake takes three. They know a contractor who is available.
The official process does not feel like a tool that helps them. It feels like a gate.
That framing matters, because it shifts the problem from compliance enforcement to user-experience design. A process people want to use does not require enforcement. A process people resent requires constant policing — and policing at scale does not work.
The goal is not to build tighter controls. It is to build a process that hiring managers naturally prefer over going around it.
What maverick spend actually costs
The financial cost of rogue spend is real. Off-contract pricing, unmanaged markups, premium agency rates for roles that should have gone through the preferred supplier list. It adds up quickly, and it is difficult to quantify precisely because the engagements are not visible in the reporting systems.
But the compliance cost is less visible and can be more severe.
An independent contractor engaged outside the formal program may not have been classified through the program’s usual process, and there may be no paper trail of how that decision was reached. Classification typically depends on the totality of the circumstances rather than any single factor, and where authorities later view a worker as having been treated as an employee, the resulting exposure generally sits with the hiring organisation rather than the worker.
Multiply that across dozens of unmanaged engagements, spanning multiple jurisdictions with different classification tests, and what looked like an administrative oversight can start to look like a pattern.
Then there is the data problem. Headcount reporting, financial accruals, project capacity planning — all of it depends on knowing who is working and on what terms. Engagements outside the VMS are invisible to that reporting. Leadership makes decisions on incomplete information, and nobody knows it until something goes wrong.
Why enforcement alone does not solve it
The standard response to maverick spend is tighter controls: mandatory VMS adoption, procurement sign-off requirements, escalation processes for off-contract hires.
These measures help. They do not solve the problem.
Enforcement tends to create workarounds. A hiring manager blocked from engaging a contractor directly will often find another route — an obscure budget code, a reframed SOW, a supplier relationship not on the preferred list. The workarounds proliferate precisely because the underlying friction has not been addressed.
Programs that have made genuine progress on maverick spend share a common characteristic: they have made the official process competitive with the alternatives. Faster intake. Clearer outputs. Less rework. And most importantly, hiring managers who trust that submitting a request through the system will get them a result — not a month-long investigation.
When the official process is faster and easier than the workaround, behaviour tends to change without enforcement.
Causes of maverick spend, and the fixes that address them
Root cause | What it looks like | How leading programs address it |
|---|---|---|
Slow intake | Manager needs talent in two weeks; intake takes three | Streamline and speed up intake so the official path is the fastest path |
Worker-type confusion | Manager asked to choose staff aug vs. IC vs. EOR upfront | Ask about the work, not the worker type; let the program handle classification |
Silence after submission | Request goes in; no confirmation of what happens next | Respond fast and clearly with the engagement type and next steps |
Duplicate data entry | Same details re-keyed into VMS, supplier, and onboarding | Eliminate duplication across the intake-to-onboarding flow |
Slow supplier response | Compliant intake, then a multi-week wait for a shortlist | Use suppliers with a short time-to-fill so speed never favours the workaround |
SOW scope creep | Time-and-materials work dressed as project-based contracts | Structural controls: competitive bidding, automated flagging, single source of spend tracking |
The intake design that changes the behaviour
Effective intake systems in mature enterprise programs share a few design principles worth examining.
First, they ask about the work, not the worker type. Most hiring managers do not know whether their need is best served by staff augmentation, an independent contractor engaged through an AOR, or an EOR engagement. Asking them to make that choice upfront is what creates errors and delays. The information they do have — the nature of the work, the timeline, the data sensitivity, the delivery structure — is what should drive the intake. Classification follows from those answers, handled by the program rather than the manager.
Second, they respond fast and clearly. A hiring manager who submits a request and immediately receives confirmation — here is what type of engagement this is, here is what happens next — is far less likely to go around the system. Silence and delay are what push people to look for alternatives.
Third, they eliminate duplication. The step where a manager has to re-enter information they have already provided — into the VMS, then again for the supplier, then again at onboarding — is where programs lose adoption. Every extra step is an opportunity to decide it is easier to handle this outside the system.
The supplier side of the equation
Even a well-designed intake process struggles if the supplier on the other end is slow.
A hiring manager who has gone through a compliant intake, received a clean classification outcome, and submitted a requisition — then waits three to four weeks for a shortlist — will remember that experience the next time they need someone in a hurry. And they may not use the official channel again.
Speed is not a premium feature of the supplier relationship. It is the baseline requirement for keeping engagement inside the program.
When your fastest supplier takes four weeks to shortlist, the unofficial alternative will tend to feel more attractive. The logic is straightforward: if the official process takes longer than going around it, some percentage of hiring managers will go around it.
SOW compliance: the harder category to control
Statement of Work engagements deserve separate attention, because they are the highest-risk category for spend that looks managed but is not.
SOW structures are legitimate tools for outcome-based work. They are also one of the most commonly misused mechanisms for hiding staff augmentation spend behind project-based contracts, allowing hiring managers and suppliers to bypass established rate cards and markup controls. The person is doing time-and-materials work. The contract says something else.
The challenge is that SOW governance sits at the intersection of procurement, legal, and the program office. When those functions do not share a consistent view, gaps open up. A contract gets signed. Nobody with the authority to flag the classification question sees it before the engagement starts.
The controls that close this gap are structural, not contractual: visible competitive bidding for SOW work, automated flagging when an engagement pattern looks like staff augmentation, and SOW spend tracked in the same system as all other contingent labour. More contract clauses do not help if nobody is reading them until something breaks.
A checklist: diagnosing your maverick spend exposure
Run through these before your next program review:
Adoption rate.
What percentage of contingent engagements in the last 12 months entered through the official intake? If you do not know, that is the first problem.
Time-to-fill benchmarks.
How does your official process compare to the fastest alternative a hiring manager could access independently?
Off-contract spend.
Are you tracking all staffing and consulting spend in departmental budgets not captured in the VMS?
SOW scope creep.
Do you have a mechanism to identify SOW engagements that function as staff augmentation in practice?
Intake duplication.
How many times does a hiring manager re-enter the same information across intake, VMS submission, and supplier onboarding?
Supplier speed.
What is your fastest supplier’s average time-to-shortlist? Is that faster than the hiring manager’s direct alternative?
Make the official channel the fastest channel
When the managed path is the fastest path, adoption tends to follow without policing. Supplier speed is a large part of that comparison.
Lifted, an Upwork Company is a tech-enabled contingent workforce supplier that plugs directly into your existing MSP or VMS program with zero disruption. Lifted’s average time-to-fill is under 3 days, drawn from a global active talent pool of 18M+ active profiles across 10K+ distinct skills. When Lifted operates as a supplier inside your program, the official channel becomes faster than the unofficial one — and the behaviour follows.
If maverick spend is showing up in your reviews, the most direct lever is making the in-program route the one hiring managers actually prefer.
Frequently asked questions
What is maverick spend in contingent workforce programs?
Maverick spend refers to contingent worker engagements that occur outside the official program — bypassing the VMS, preferred supplier list, or established classification and rate-card processes. It can result in hidden headcount, unmanaged compliance risk, and off-contract pricing.
Why do hiring managers bypass the official contingent workforce program?
Usually because the official process is slower or more complex than alternatives available to them. Speed is the primary driver in most cases, rather than deliberate circumvention.
How does faster supplier response time reduce maverick spend?
When the official process delivers results faster than the alternative, the incentive to work around it tends to disappear. Reducing time-to-fill from weeks to days removes one of the most common justifications for bypassing the program.
What is the compliance risk of IC engagements outside a contingent workforce program?
It can be significant. Where a worker is engaged without going through the program’s usual classification process, authorities may later view that worker differently than the contract intended. Classification generally turns on the totality of the circumstances rather than any single factor, so engaging outside the program removes the documentation and oversight that help manage that risk.
Author
Lee Willoughby
Senior Marketing Director, Lifted
Lee Willoughby is the Senior Marketing Director at Lifted, an Upwork company helping enterprises source, engage, and manage contingent talent across every contract type. With a background as a co-founder and workforce technology entrepreneur, Lee focuses on the future of contingent workforce management, helping organizations navigate the complexities of global talent, compliance, and workforce transformation.
This content is for general informational purposes only, and is not intended to be and should not be viewed as legal or tax advice. Readers should contact their attorney or tax professional to obtain advice with respect to any particular legal or tax matter. Information discussed can change frequently, and Lifted cannot guarantee that all information is current at all times.
