‘It’s going on at all levels,’ says former employee. ‘All the executives are aware of it.’
In 2016, Yasser Elabd noticed a $40,000 payment to a client in Africa that didn’t smell right. The payment came from Microsoft’s business investment fund — money meant for closing deals and opening up new lines of business. But the customer named in the request wasn’t a customer at all, at least not according to the internal client list. He was a former Microsoft employee who had been terminated for poor performance, and he’d left the company so recently that its rules would have barred him from approval.
It was suspicious, more like a bribe than a proper business request — but when he pushed for more details, other managers started to push back. Eventually, the payment was stopped, but there were no broader consequences, and few seemed interested in digging deeper. He came to believe his colleagues were far more comfortable with this kind of payment than he was.
In the two years that followed, Elabd says he did everything in his power to stamp out these quiet bribes — a fight that made him a pariah among his colleagues and eventually cost him his job. But looking back, he believes Microsoft wasn’t interested in stopping the payouts, preferring to let phony contracts slip through and accept the associated cash.
Elabd went public with his experiences in an essay published Friday by the...
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