It can be an awkward moment when you realize you’re working for someone who is not only immoral, but who could seriously damage your career in service of their own.
OP was an immigrant in the US on a work visa. When he learned his CEO was planning to sell the company, he just kept doing his job.
I met an amazing mentor while doing my masters in the US who hired me to work for a company where he was the COO after I graduated. I’m an immigrant to the US, so my visa is conditioned upon being employed: get fired, and I would quickly get deported back to the Middle East.
The CEO of that company was planning on selling the company to a much larger British firm, so he wanted to maximize revenue in the short term so that he could get a better price for it. He also had a huge ego, and so did the sales VP. She was convinced that I was too young and inexperienced for my job and tried to sabotage me quite often.
Part of my job was ensuring that we respected out terms of use for the data we bought from our suppliers: I would make sure that our customers used it in the pre-approved way, that the engineers used and encrypted the right data for each product, and that we reported usage and sales accurately so that the suppliers could bill us.
When he saw his CEO make a mistake, he treated it as an honest one – but he was wrong.
Well the sales VP and the CEO had approved a bunch of deals where they allowed a customer to use the data in a way that breached our supplier contracts and underreported sales to the supplier, so that they could pad the company’s revenue and get a bigger payout once they sold it.
I brought it up to them because I thought they might have gotten the contract terms wrong at first but they threatened to fire me and have me deported if I didn’t go along.
Whistleblowing would’ve just gotten me deported anyway since the suppliers were not based in the US.
OP knew the oldest rule in the book, though, and documented everything.
One of the suppliers asked to audit our reported sales data, but the CEO kept delaying the audit and hid it from the British firm who was going to buy us.
I kept track of every single transaction they made in that way, however.
After the British firm bought that company, I was one of the people they kept on because I was managing the product lines really well at the time.
I got along with the new owners quite well.
Those documents paid off in a big way – or maybe even more than one.
So when they decided to review the contracts and discovered the audit, I gave them every single file I had on those fraudulent transactions.
The company had been in breach of contract with several suppliers and I had the paper trail to prove it.
The new owners immediately worked with the supplier to address the issue and reimburse them.
They then claimed that this additional expense had been incurred before the purchase (since the audit predated it), deduced it and the revenue based on it from the company’s total value, and then took that out of the payout that they were supposed to give the CEO and VP.
Those two idiots didn’t make a single cent off of selling their company, and that’s after they had worked on it for 6 years.
Reddit, give this man his awards!
The top comment says good for OP for documenting!
It’s good advice in all areas of life.
This person applauds OP’s professional revenge.
And he helped himself out in the process.
The right thing to do is not the easy thing to do, most of the time.
I don’t think anything good ever happens when you’re being asked to “go along.”
It’s always best to think for yourself.
Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were travelling for business.