When you work in finance, one of the most important parts of your job is making sure the numbers are reported accurately.

What would you do if someone kept providing you with information that was clearly wrong, but refused to change it?

That is what the guy in this story experienced, but he was able to get the last laugh in the end.

Check it out.

Refuse to Provide Accurate Investment Percentages And Take Me Off Reporting Team? Enjoy being fired and losing equity in the business.

I work for a very large financial company.

Like the tech industry, occasionally we will want to pursue market opportunities in areas we are not necessarily experts in.

It is much easier and faster to buy (either whole or a controlling interest) in a specialized investment company or advisor in order to acquire their talent, resources and industry connections (commonly called an acqui-hire).

Several years ago, we acquired a controlling interest in one such company.

That could be quite an incentive.

As an incentive to keep the talent on board and minimize disruptions to their business, instead of buying them outright, we bought about 2/3 of the interest and the management bought the remainder.

They then hung shares of that remainder over the heads of certain key managers as future bonuses to be triggered by performance and remaining with the company for specific amounts of time beyond the acquisition.

The CIO of the company was one such employee.

We shall call him Mr. CIO.

This guy was a piece of work.

Oh, one of those types of people.

He prided himself in having attended some university (I forget which) and felt that anyone without a certain title or higher was beneath him.

He was used to being a big fish at his company, but didn’t quite get that guys like him in his new corporate parent were a dime a dozen.

I worked on the acquisition of his company and interacted with him fairly regularly, and while he was super nice with my boss, he never wasted an opportunity to be condescending to me (even though I was doing the bulk of the work).

His favorite move was to refuse to answer my calls or emails and instead instruct his secretary to reply on his behalf after I had reached out to him multiple times about the same thing.

Luckily his secretary was awesome and IMHO, probably good enough to have done his job.

Anyhow, as a result of the acquisition, the company now had to report a host of different activities to the parent company on a fairly regular basis.

One of these things was the percentage ownership of certain investments in a wide range of funds, by a host of different entities.

The thing to know is that as you invested in these funds, your entity acquired an equity stake that varied somewhat from reporting period to reporting period based on the performance of the fund and how much you were invested in it at the time.

Unless the size of your investment changed substantially, the percentage variation in the ownership stake varied very little from one period to another.

Still, those fluctuations had to be reported regardless of size.

I tracked these for a host of similar companies owned by the parent company and had developed a reporting system that all of them used, which ensured detailed and accurate reporting.

Of course, he just wants to make things difficult.

Everyone that is, except for this company, which at the express direction of their CIO, refused.

Now I tried talking sense to the CIO, his analysts and to his secretary, and in every case, he shut me down.

Instead of supplying the information in the manner requested, he sent me an automatic performance summary generated by different software.

He told me to figure out the numbers myself, because his staff didn’t have the time to change their methods and accommodate me.

Of course, I went to my bosses with this, and their advice that since this was a new company and we really wanted to build good relations with them while we were integrating them into our business, to just play along and try and play nice with this guy.

In other words, make the best of it.

Enter Malicious compliance.

I did exactly what they ordered me to do.

Every single reporting period, for a year, I took their crappy report, fleshed out their numbers as best as possible, and reported them, fully knowing that they were inaccurate.

Every single time, I interacted with their staff, I made sure to tell them this and to ask them to please use the system every other investment subsidiary was using.

Every single time, they came back with orders from the CIO to refuse.

Around that time, the CIO decided to grace us with his presence and flies in to do a meet and greet with our team.

My boss and I even had a one on one meeting with him.

Wow, talk about petty.

Mr. CIO comes into the room greets my boss and then proceeds to ignore that I’m standing in front of him with my hand out waiting to shake his (even looked me in the eye while proceeding to ignore me in front of my boss).

I waved off his behavior and time passed.

About 6 months later the parent company decides to audit their business, and what do you think they find?

Yep, they find that all their equity and performance reports are off (sometimes way off).

Of course, the president of the sub gets a call from my boss’s boss,the Parent Company’s CIO and gets an earful.

They in turn pull in the CIO and give him an earful about their reports.

He immediately proceeds to throw me under the bus.

The next day I get called in to my boss’s office for a conference call with the president of the subsidiary, the CIO and the Corporate CIO.

Right off the bat CIO starts demeaning me and demanding to know how I could possibly have messed up their reporting.

The guy lays into me and demands that I be fired for the mess up.

By now I’m tired of this guy’s attitude and I’m done playing nice with him, so I asked to be excused, get my laptop and return.

Good think he kept his records.

I then proceeded to forward and quote email after email evidencing my requests for compliance and his express refusal to do so for a year and a half.

The Corporate CIO thanked me and asked me to step out of the meeting.

A couple of days later, my boss pulls me aside to tell me that going forward, the subsidiary will be reporting all figures as per my instructions, and the CIO had gotten the chewed out by his and my bosses.

However, while he agreed to comply going forward, he demanded that I no longer be part of the reporting process.

My boss told me not to worry about it, that it was one less thing for me to worry about and the CIO was just being vindictive because I had embarrassed him in front of his bosses.

Fair enough, I passed the process on to someone else and enjoyed the reduced stress.

I still had to interact with the company’s analysts on direct investments, but I no longer had to interact with the CIO, which was fine by me.

Finally, he got what he deserved.

Fast forward two months and I find out that CIO has been fired, and that it was his handling of my report that caused the Corporate CIO to order a review of this guy’s investments and reporting at every level.

They found discrepancies everywhere (sometimes serious ones).

It seems he had been fudging numbers in order to report better performance than he was actually generating.

He did this because he was not one of the initial equity holders but was one of those managers who had been offered equity stakes in the company based on performance and longevity.

His refusal to play ball with my little report ended up shining a light on his activities, which ultimately cost him his job and a very lucrative equity stake in the business which was probably worth 7 figures.

Wow, not only was this guy a jerk but a corrupt jerk at that.

Let’s see what the people in the comments think about the situation.

Yes, I think everyone knows at least one person like this.

People love trying to get away with scams.

Hopefully, this commenter has a good outcome as well.

Yes, always save your emails.

Yeah, why would he have such an attitude?

Why would he be such a jerk when he was cooking the books?

It came back to bite him, though.

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