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.

  • Libra00@lemmy.worldEnglish
    29·
    2 days ago

    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.