Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

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> Without more detail on what exactly Microsoft was extracting out of these circumstances I find the whole thing vague.

I think the big problem here is that you've misunderstood why bribery is a criminal matter. The fact you're talking about Microsoft being "one of the victims in that case" is another sign you do not get it. Corruption itself is the problem, we're not trying to ensure Microsoft gets their $$$.

To root out corruption, the relatively less corrupt major industrialised nations agreed rules forbidding their business entities from having anything to do with such practices even via a third party. When Microsoft realises that their guy in Saudi is involved in something dodgy, their duty isn't "hide it so the big bosses don't know" or even "pay the guy off and find somebody else" but to report this corruption to the government.

These are leaches, they have to be starved, and that won't be effective so long as, like in this story, there are nods and winks and everybody pretends it's fine so long as they got paid.

If that is happening, then you're absolutely correct. However, there's no evidence that's happening...either in the Verge article or in the whistleblower's own words. All the whistleblower has presented is Microsoft's own PWC audits that resellers have been pocketing more money than policy says they should and that there are cases where company policy was violated. The leap from this evidence to bribery is, frankly, pandering to the reader's prior beliefs.

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.

I'm in this camp here. The article does a poor job framing the actual involvement Microsoft had and the whistleblower's writeup doesn't do a good job either. They did provide instances in the original whistleblowing that bad things did happen.. but they also showed that a lot of them actually got some sort of punishment/reaction instead of just pretending situation normal. A buyer, a reseller, and a seller working together to find a price that works by lowering the cost of goods is not a bribe since you know nobody is getting paid. They seemed to be heavily extrapolating that the buyer, reseller, and the Microsoft rep are splitting the proceeds of the cost mismatch regularly outside of normal revenues for the reseller and Microsoft. There needed to be a lot more sensible storytelling from the whistleblower pointing a finger and blowing the whistle at specific people who were doing the accused tactic.

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.

>A buyer, a reseller, and a seller working together to find a price that works by lowering the cost of goods is not a bribe since you know nobody is getting paid.

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.

I'm responding directly to what the whistleblower was alleging and they really didn't support an argument of their case. "I have damning information" doesn't mean anything without explaining more clearly what the damning information actually contains. Since they didn't I just can respond only to what the whistleblower wrote, and they didn't make a good case. They did not connect that their personal experience turned into an obvious out-of-channel enrichment of the buyer or the Microsoft person in cash or in kind. Asking your suppliers to reduce costs so that you can sell for the same price is normal, it happens in pretty much all industries. They are merely alleging that it was the path to nefarious acts.

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.

The problem with your argument, which has been pointed out to you already, is that these allegations are based on nothing more than circumstances that look abnormal. Overselling or underusing seats is not proof that bribery took place. The shear $ amount of unused software looks particularly bad until you realize those are all the licenses that were purchased for all of the schools, and all school government related work for a country with millions of people. What's more, those licenses could have been purchased as part of an initiative that ran out of funding before it could be completed. Poor government planning is so ordinary as to be boring.

This so called whistle blower is pointing to virtually public information and saying, "but I think it's obvious!" The problem is that it only looks obvious to someone who hasn't thought about what else could be going on. Maybe it's impossible for so many suspicious events, but it's at least equally possible that if bribes are going on, Microsoft has no knowledge of it.

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