Working for a corrupt company is no picnic, but you can protect yourself by having proof of what you were asked to do and how you responded.

That’s what the employee did in this story.

Check out how his record keeping saved his skin and gave the corrupt executives what they deserved.

Break the law? Sure thing Boss, sign here please!

My job as a spare parts estimator was to work out what parts of our main product the customer wanted, find out how much it would cost us to make, add a little mark up and send them a quote.

A £1 million+ estimate came in.

The sales guy told me that if this one went well, there was another to follow of an even bigger size, ultimately looking at £10 million over the next four years. So I set to work.

I was in constant contact with 20+ vendors getting specifications, technical details, prices and lead times for over four hundred items.

After six weeks, my masterpiece was complete.

It was going well until the compliance requirements came into play.

Sales guy says that because of the country this customer is in, they need to have four or more quotes in from different customers in order to get it cleared by their government.

We were the OEM of the product and there’s nowhere else on the planet they could get these parts from, so we’d have to work through third parties to get it done, and he knew just the guy.

I was asked to do the normal quote to him, then to bump the prices up by 30% and send that to three other companies who had been asking about it so they would absolutely not get the contract with the end user.

I argued the point, saying that the whole purpose of the anti-corruption policy is to prevent situations exactly like this, but I was overruled.

He knew he could be the fall guy and did something about it.

Two years later with no sale, I find out through a different sales guy that the client has been put on a blacklist by this country’s government over this project.

Senior management launch a huge investigation and my quote is examined in microscopic detail.

They ask: “Why did you give different prices to these other three when you knew it was all to do with anti-corruption? We should fire you!

That’s millions of pounds of order you’ve lost us!”

Out comes the email. Everyone suddenly gets very quiet, and the COO starts packing his desk in a box the next week.

Let’s see what people had to say in the comments.

It’s a classy way way to let your boss or client know that you’re not to be messed with.

I’d be worried about this, too.

A lot of commenters like this one admired his patience.

This one made me laugh.

No wonder so many people are scared of medical tests.

Be prepared in case your boss wants to throw you under the bus.

Document, document, document!

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.