I work for a small company, in the United States. Part of my duties is building out quotes for products and services our company sells. I’m trying to avoid being overly specific, but basically I have been asked to quote out a product we often sell, but to also include in the quote a feature which out company cannot actually provide. The customer has several of the item I am supposed to quote already and believes that they have the additional feature on all of the existing devices, so expects to see it on this quote for their new site.
I have brought up with my boss in the past that we have not implemented the additional feature and to the best of my knowledge we can’t. He assured me he was looking at addressing that. Today, after receiving the request for this new quote, I asked my boss about it, he said he still hasn’t come up with a plan to address the issue, but wants me to move forward with pricing it out anyway.
It would be a big hit to our company if the customer left us, but I struggle to see how what my company is doing here isn’t fraud. I’m not really comfortable with doing this, but my relationship with management is already strained and I wasn’t really looking to create any more waves at the moment.
Are there good resources I could look to to determine if this would constitute fraud from a legal perspective? Has anyone here ever been in a similar situation?
I’m looking for another job, but don’t have anything lined up yet, so nervous about doing (or not doing) something that would get me fired, but Im not comfortable with what appears to me to be dishonest at best and fraudulent at worst.
Edit: wanted to add that to the best of my knowledge, we aren’t selling that additional feature to anyone else at the moment. I think my boss is just afraid of this customer in particular finding out since they’ve already been sold the feature and they’re a larger customer.
Edit 2: thanks everyone for the advice. It is much appreciated. I’ve got a lot of thinking to do tonight.
Refuse. I’ve done so multiple times. They were very small things, not job-ending / company-boycotting things. Like setting someone’s auto-reply when they took time off. I asked their supervisor to write it for me and pasted it in.
Them him/her I have to think about it for a bit, and then take a recorder in my pocket when “revisiting” the conversation.
Keep the receipts. Get written proof that your boss wanted you to push forward. If they lose the client you can use those to prove you tried to warn them.
Cover your own ass first.
Good advice. I did start bcc’ing my personal email when talking about this.
Do yourself and go dig up the send receipts from the emails you’ve already sent on the subject, because if it comes down to it the company will not hesitate to delete them to try to get rid of the evidence. Email them to your private account or print them out and take them home, keep off-site records that aren’t attached to their network.
I’m a former cybersecurity professional who has done penetration testing for companies where it turned out the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing and we almost got seriously fucked (as in criminal charges pressed) because the guy who hired us and gave us the OK to hit their systems did not have clearance from his boss and tried to delete emails to cover his ass. Never trust someone who might have a vested interest in screwing you with the ability to do so.
tried to delete emails to cover his ass
didn’t they get the email about not taking down the webserver
lawl. Kinda reminds me of the front fell off
Those videos are still hilarious years later
classic
FYI, your employer will probably see these outgoing emails from your mailbox, it will turn up in logs and be very obvious for someone in IT who you don’t even know if they see emails going to a random gmail address. You probably signed something when you were hired about not doing this, and it might create an IT issue for you. Also, since it’s a bcc, your boss’s replies won’t be there, so it probably won’t do you as much good as you think in proving they told you so. I would not recommend doing this.
Depending on how much control they can see into your work laptop, i would recommend printing the email threads as PDFs and copying them to a thumb drive if you need them. This would be harder to detect, but if your laptop is managed by the org, and someone does have it out for you, they could be watching your every movement, so it isn’t 100% safe.
If you think you are being closely monitored, I guess your best course of action would be to get an HDMI capture device on a personal computer, and then record your monitor as you’re viewing the emails.
Far more likely they’ll detect the foreign hardware plugged in to the device (assuming it allows new devices to be added at all) than someone in IT randomly coming across some sent emails - could’ve been to a client for all they know.
However, if someone is suspicious and ASKS IT to pull the logs it should be pretty easy to see. But if it’s gotten to that point, you’re still better off having the emails than not.
I guess it depends on the company and their policies. I’ve been an admin in Google Workspace, and it’s almost hard to avoid seeing some of the reports of the metadata of external incoming and outgoing email.
I remember we even had a rule for external emails with a name that employee name. This was mostly to identify and block scammers impersonating the CEO, but would also inadvertently catch a whole bunch of other weird stuff people were doing as well, but that was mostly someone setting up a shadow IT service that would send email with the name of an employee, which we’d then have to chase and figure out.
I’m less familiar with the MDM software running on laptops, it’s possible that each file copied to a thumb drive is logged, so that is totally a risk, but i imagine it would be harder to detect if that’s a common thing that people do at the org.
Don’t they monitor what you copy to thumb drives?
Yeah, that could depend on the level of monitoring and access they have, and what your risk level is. Since they say it’s a small company, the laptops might not be managed, but almost certainly they will have reports on incoming and outgoing emails, and a bcc to a gmail address would be a huge red flag. I would assume that small PDF files copied to a thumb drive wouldn’t raise suspicion, but you’d want to fly under the radar and not have the number of files be crazy or the file size be huge, since that would move you to the top of the list in an aggregated report, and have more eyes on you.
CYA = cover your ass
Always.
I have never worked in IT and not had at least one project I worked on which I didn’t think was immoral. Even at a small web dev agency I was working on an app for keeping track of zero hours contract workers during their shifts in a major UK supermarket. I got invited into a meeting 2 weeks before it got released and told not to buy any tescos stock.
2 weeks later on release they fired several thousand of their full time employees and referred them on to this 3rd party to get their old jobs back with new - worse - contracts like zero guaranteed working hours.
Then there was the startup that was in adtech and spied on people online. We were on the adblock easylist of trackers to block.
After that there was the gambling company… idk it just seems like every job has a morally grey component to it.
Edit: had an episode of John Oliver Last Week Tonight about my current company on air last week.
Edit 2: One of my friends was working for VW in Berlin when the emissions test scandal came out. Ultimately she quit being a SWE and became a nurse. I guess everyone has their own tolerance levels for the shady shit they are comfortable doing at work.
Another friend used to work for a porn site but wouldn’t ever touch gambling. He’s still a SWE though.
So, given your work history, where do you stand on the Clerks deathstar contractor debate?
Uh I guess my movie enthusiast opinion is that Clerks is a very funny movie that has some surprisingly good social commentary burried under the irreverence.
If we’re talking about the actual morality of normal people working at “evil” companies, then I guess it wouldn’t be an injustice if there was some kind of cosmic punishment for it. The reality is that capitalism is cut throat and typically more “evil” companies like the arms, gambling or tobacco industry offer you better benefits or financial renumeration than ones that don’t have that stigma.
At the same time I’d argue that there are very few truly “good” jobs. A large component of the charity sector is essentially sales; even if you are working at a company building some inoffensive productivity app or B2B software you can end up potentially automating work that used to be done by a human office admin.
At the end of the day you need to work out what your individual tolerance level is for the excesses of capitalism. If society really frowns upon an industry then people vote and the laws change so ultimately those are the parameters you are working within.
I always am of the belief that every employee of a company is complicit in its wrongdoings if they continue to work there knowingly. Companies can’t opperate without employees so the best way to make changes in them is for the workers to quit. Thats why i hate it when people defend customer service employees when their job is litterally to be the front face of the company towards its consumers.
My friend used to work at the call centre for Sky tv who are like a cable company in the UK. People phone up because they want to cancel and their job is to try to discourage them from cancelling for another few days. He left after convincing a legally blind lady to keep her tv subscription.
If going to push back don’t make it personal, that you are uncomfortable doing this. Change the focus to concern it would be putting the organization at risk of liability if we can’t provide the good or service. Potential to damage the relationship with an important customer and reduce revenue. CYA with documentation and good luck on the job search.
It happened to me and I refused in an internal email with a lot of people in CC (the CEO was included). I politely explained why it was very illegal and why I wouldn’t do it. They stopped asking me because “they knew that I knew that they knew.”
If it’s the same kind of company, you would say yes, the client would discover the lie, and your company would fire you in less than a few minutes. You usually don’t last long in that kind of environment.
One of our former bosses asked me to sign something clearly illegal. I told him NO. I am still here, the boss is a former boss.
I wish mine was that simple. I was asked to install our RMM (backdoor remote access tool) on a partners home personal computer. I said I didn’t feel comfortable doing this without her knowledge and without good reason. Wrote up a long email with explanation after I was told to do it anyway. The reply I got from the email was “you don’t get to make that decision, you’re going to get a bad review this year, do what you’re told.”
Luckily it took me about 2 weeks to find another job, and fully disclosed why I was leaving. Emailed everything to HR and left without warning, even told the partner their plan.
Left them scathing reviews on all platforms, HR even reached out about my reviews. Said “you didn’t care then, what’s changed”
A side quest of my life is to keep their reviews around 2.5 forever. I’ve got a dozen fake accounts to help already. Fuck them.
No. Sorry. Next time you ask, can you put it on an email please?
I’ve quit jobs for ethical reasons. But I’m a carpenter, it’s easy to find a job in my field.
I think your best bet is to find a new employer. Definitely keep CYA documents as needed in the meantime, though.
Isn’t charging for something you don’t provide while saying you do fraud?
Idk, I pay my health insurance premiums and then get my coverage denied and have to fight for what I paid for, is that fraud?
If I’m understanding correctly, you’ve not been selling the customer the additional feature but they think you have been and now your boss wants you to actually start billing them for the feature that they mistakenly think they are getting already but without actually providing the feature to them? Assuming that is correct it really does sound like fraud. Generally you can’t knowingly sell something you aren’t capable of selling but still collect the money. Even if the victim mistakenly thinks they got what they paid for you are still defrauding them of the money. I’m not a lawyer but I think if you do this you may end up needing a lawyer. Is there anyone else in the company besides your boss that you could talk to about this? The more people know about what is going on the harder it will be for your boss to pull of whatever he is trying to pull off. If something like this was going on where I work I would be documenting everything and sharing it with whoever would look at it, starting with my bosses boss. I wouldn’t make any accusations though, just present the facts and express your concerns.
If the pricing is itemised, you could price the impossible feature at an exorbitant rate.
Either way, has your company previously sold this feature or is this just a mistaken belief about the existence of the feature that the customer has somehow invented themselves?
If the feature isn’t on any of the customer’s previous itemisations and they’re the ones who made it up accidentally, suddenly seeing it on a new itemisation with a sky-high price tag might make them realise without explicitly telling them, which may or may not be what you (as the individual) want. I assume your boss will get wind of this one way or the other, so you could get them on-side by suggesting this idea.
Is this feature something one of your company’s rivals might be able to implement or is this one of those situations where the feature would literally break the laws of physics? (Or mathematics, etc.) If the latter, it might be easier to come clean to the customer with a full explanation. If the former, your company needs to get on R&D immediately. Consult experts in the field. And that’s where the exorbitant rate comes in.
How much of this your company shares with the customer is down to your chain of command. How much you share with the customer is down to how much it will affect you personally one way or the other.
Lots of ifs, buts and maybes here. Good luck. I think you need it.
How are you supposed to quote a service or project that you don’t have any experience or pricing information for? I would suggest it’s on your boss to deliver what he told you to include and not on you unless you know he has no intention to provide what is offered. Also, including something that doesn’t get delivered might allow the customer to withdraw or renegotiate the contract.
Obviously you don’t want to do something unethical, but I guess I’d just say to think carefully about what is really your responsibility and what isn’t.
They decided that theyll just tell me what needs to go on the quotes and what price to set it at and then I do that. Most of the things I price out have prices defined for them already. I’m really just a dumb middle man in this process.
The fact that the customer might withdrawal I think is why he’s afraid to just be upfront with them on it.
I’d just say to think carefully about what is really your responsibility and what isn’t.
That seems fair, and is more or less the position my coworker took…still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I respect your ethical take. But my respect doesn’t put food on your table. Do what you have to do to sleep at night, and maybe that’s an ethical decision or maybe it’s just knowing you sleep better with a roof over your head.
If you consider yourself a highly ethical person, I wouldn’t be in sales of I were you. It’s hard to find really successful salesmen without a lot of gray area in their ethics.
But at the end is the day, you probably can’t know that your boss won’t find a way to deliver. Anyway good luck. Sounds like a difficult position to be in.
