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Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
401–409 of 409 posts
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#402I have been reading the comments about bribing foreign companies. Very interesting I think it is pertinent to remind people here, especially subjects of the USA, that in the USA bribing politicians is a formal and accepted practise. Records are kept, they are publicly available. The hypocrisy of those politicians is legendary for all sorts of reasons, this is just a minor point. Bribery is only illegal if done inform…
This is very misleading particularly for those not familiar US laws. If you want to say publicly disclosed campaign contributions with no quid pro quo is bribery than say so but that's not most people's definition of bribery. Democracy requires campaigns and campaigns require money.
> If you want to say publicly disclosed campaign contributions with no quid pro quo is bribery than say so but that's not most people's definition of bribery.
No. It is the "I will vote for this law if you contribute this much". In my country (New Zealand) that would get you jail time. Because it is bribery
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the offending employees passed the training This is the definition of ineffective training :)
It's effective in its real goal (preventing fines), just not in its stated goal (preventing bribery). Of course this means that it's at best a half-truth to call it training (a more accurate name would be e.g. "indemnity procedure").
Might be effective indemnity, but it's ineffective training :-)
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#404No post body was provided.
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
No need to wonder. Of course it's bribery. Most likely not by Microsoft, but by their local VARs, with tacit corporate approval. All the blood, sweat and tears we gave during the early 2000's to make FLOSS the standard, how we advocated for it on grounds of openness and auditability, how it would - and did! - help foster a local industry... All this work and see it being undone by the current government and their cro…
A bit like any time a local government makes a concerted effort to move to Linux, suddenly Microsoft magically finds a way to deeply discount Windows and Office just for them.
Or even not discount it, but some magical requirements about compatibility with existing software that was never used pop up while others, about security and auditability disappear…
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think every culture has exactly the same ethical framework. One can easily imagine a few different examples where that's not the case.
I think the question is more about whether you have the same ethical framework when dealing with other cultures as when dealing with your own, not whether other cultures tend toward different ethical standards themselves.
Your consistent ethical framework can be to respect the laws (the de facto laws) of the places you operate in. For a whole country, part of any reasonable ethical code is something like not interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, which means not exercising legal jurisdiction over actions that take place in other countries and don't really concern you.
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#407Former Microsoftie here. After all the business ethics training videos I had to sit through, I am infuriated by this.
In almost every country with a dictator and human right abuses, you will find a constitution guarantying civil rights and liberties of the individual... [1] - "The Constitution of the Russian Federation" Article 17 1. In the Russian Federation recognition and guarantees shall be provided for the rights and freedoms of man and citizen according to the universally recognized principles and norms of international law an…
Maybe they just kept the Soviet one with some edits of the nation's name. That one was also wonderfully progressive and respecting of human rights... On paper. Come to think of it, did the Soviet Union really "go under"? Only in the sense of losing all its peripheral territories, AFAICS; the core remains. In several senses.
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
Special Olympics British Columbia was the best my Google-fu could find. I am assuming some TV series but ...
I thought it must be a TV series with a character "Nelson". I was feeling very old Turns out it is some MS corporate thing. Feeling lucky now!
I assumed The Simpsons. Isn't that bully kid with the "ha-HAA" laugh named Nelson?
Edit: Yup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Muntz
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 to…
>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…
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.