I am attempting to convince the higher ups at my company that spending $55 to renew one domain for a year is bad when they end up having 3-4 domains names for one website.

They're reasoning for doing so is to keep these domains names out of the hands of the competition.

For example, the company name is Pie Consulting & Engineering. They want to buy up pieforensicconsulting.com to keep it out of the hands of a competitor (we also do forensic engineering). Could a competitor use that domain in any kind of diabolical way? I mean I figure if someone is typing in pieforensiconsulting into the url field, they know what they're looking for and if it redirects to another company, they're not just going to stay on the site.