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.
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.