There's a lot more extrapolation of facts into a narrative from the original whistleblower post. Trying to say that licenses that were bought that never were used was bribery is just confusing. Even I have licenses for things kicking around that I never installed but intended to someday. Whole projects can get planned, licenses purchased, and then for one reason or another scrapped but the licenses (or other material from vendors) are still 'bought.' For the bribery to mean anything (or like that other commenter who tried to whip out FCPA randomly) someone has to get enriched by the experience other than the reseller selling something and paying Microsoft its share. The whistleblower post didn't do that well.
There is just not a lot of good information that was provided by the whistleblower to actually connect all of this money that he estimates at $200 million to any sort of reality. Do I think he has enough beef for a employment law retaliation case (if he was in jurisdiction US law)? Probably. Did some people commit bribes and Microsoft was fined/Microsoft fired people? Probably. Do some resellers who are external to Microsoft end up violating the FCPA or 'normal US business ethics' in some regions? Definitely. But they aren't in the US, so the right venue for whistleblowing the activity is in whatever-country-in-question under their laws. Just based on the article and whistleblower post it sounds like there is just an assumption that micro problems in his local leadership were macro problems. I am not convinced.
They're not lowering the price of goods. The non-discounted amount is still charged to the end customer. The difference in the amount charged to the customer and what's paid in licensing to MS is used as a slush fund to bribe the decision maker.
>Trying to say that licenses that were bought that never were used was bribery is just confusing.
Come on, it's not that confusing. They're inflating the value of the contract so that they can skim more off.
>Do some resellers who are external to Microsoft end up violating the FCPA or 'normal US business ethics' in some regions? Definitely. But they aren't in the US, so the right venue for whistleblowing the activity is in whatever-country-in-question under their laws. Just based on the article and whistleblower post it sounds like there is just an assumption that micro problems in his local leadership were macro problems. I am not convinced.
I don't understand how you're not convinced. MS has paid a fine for the exact same behavior across multiple countries in different regions. And here is a person who has been in the thick of it for 20 years alleging the exact same scheme with documents to back it up. It's a slam dunk case.
If you go into the whistleblower's complaint and remove everything that is not his firsthand account there's shockingly little there around bribery. I do think that this individual has an HR legal case for being mistreated based on their writing but that has little to do with the alleged bribery. Reading an audit report that they didn't pen doesn't mean much and the findings could have been made right without their knowledge. Nobody goes back and marks findings on an original audit report 'fixed.' There is also a lot of jumping to conclusions. The only thing in the whistleblower post that I can see that they provided as concrete issue that they were firsthand involved with was a sum of $40,000 which is a great distance away from the $200 MM they are suggesting. If it was as prevalent they would have multiple transactions they were directly aware of and the sum would be much higher than $40,000. There is an assumption laden in the article that the only outcome for any discrepancy are bad actors enriching themselves instead of negligence or incompetence. Bringing in other cases where Microsoft was fined is irrelevant for the purpose of their whistleblowing, nobody cares about the other crimes we already know about we care about the crime you saw.
Too much of this sounds like a jilted employee on a PIP and not enough of it was just straight facts and clear cause for action. You don't need to craft a narrative, just whistleblow on what you saw.
If you're saying the resellers themselves are corrupt to make a score in, say, the Saudi case, well, that's the reseller business and it's all a question of degree. There is no law that if a reseller negotiates a better rate from the vendor that they're required to pass those savings on. It's skeevy and a reason the reseller business should disappear, but it's not any different from a car salesman.