Working under a bad boss is frustrating, but it’s even worse when your job and your legal right to stay in the country are on the line.

What if your boss pressured you into unethical practices to boost profits before selling the company, and threatening to expose them could cost you everything? Would you risk your career and immigration status to do the right thing? Or keep quiet and protect yourself?

In the following story, one employee finds himself in this exact predicament and waits for the perfect moment to expose everything.

Here’s how it all played out

Cost a horrible boss all the profits from selling his company

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 our 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.

Trying to help the company, he got threatened instead.

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 with them because I thought they might have gotten the contract terms wrong at first, but they threatened to fire me and deport me if I didn’t go along.

Since the suppliers were not based in the US, whistleblowing would’ve just gotten me deported anyway.

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 that was going to buy us.

Thankfully, he had a paper trail, which helped the new owners.

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.

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.

This was a smart move.

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), deducted 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 didn’t make a single cent off of selling their company, and that’s after they had worked on it for 6 years.

Wow! That’s one way of sticking it to them.

Let’s check out how the folks over at Reddit relate to this story.

This would’ve been very helpful.

They probably don’t want anything to do with him.

Here’s someone who appreciates immigrants like him.

According to this person, the story may not be true.

They got exactly what they deserved!

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.