You haven't had to deal with large corporations, I take it.
If one of your workers raises an alert that someone else may be doing something damaging to the company, you sue first and ask questions later. Going into damage control mode is the only possible way to deal with this sort of situation for a large business. Would it have made sense to clear this internally? Sure. It might even be the decent thing to do, but: When your entire business model is built upon trust, and there is even the slightest hint that that trust may be compromised, you do not **** around. You go into damage control mode and pull out all the stops. You talk about trust between employers and employees, but the harsh reality is that the bigger the company is, the lower the risk is these people can take when trusting employees.
A case like this would not be handled at the level where this guy's manager would have any input. It would go straight to their internal revision, and those guys do not, as a rule, go lenient. And given that the thing under investigation is a possible breach of the Post- and Telecommunications Laws, this has to be formally investigated by the state.
And again, mika, you are wildly overstepping the bounds of your confidence here. We do not know nearly enough about the gory details to be condemming anyone's behaviour here.
The person who filed the complaint did her job correctly. She saw a potential risk and reported it up the proper channels. That's how things are done.
Take a cup of coffee or whatever substance you like to drink, this is going to be long. You have been warned.
I'm well aware that it appears to you that I may be overstepping the confidence bounds. However, what happens when I'm still right? Could it be just a coincidence, or could it be wisdom? Your choice. Know that though, that I do assessments of people applying for a position in the company I work at.
The more interesting thing is your choice of wording, actually in a couple of places. If the last sentence, for example, said "That's how things are done [here]", I would agree. However, you are sorely mistaken to assume the same logic would follow elsewhere. Moreover, you assume all large corporation behave that way. This is a mistake.
What it comes to working in a large company, how large is large? I work at a company that has about 3000 employees, and our customers range from one man companies to companies employing tens of thousands of people. And yes, I work in R&D field where trust is of utmost importance - where it may mean the life and death of your customer. Sometimes I don't bother with NDAs with small companies that have only a couple of persons since the legal costs for them just to check up the wording of the agreement would be high. However, I still treat them like there would be an effective NDA in place - this is just based on personal integrity. I could easily be accused of not following proper company procedures on numerous instances - following company procedures would prohibit my work from being done. We could also take stuff from our small customers and get away with it, but we simply don't. From what I have seen from the Central European colleagues working in equal positions, they do wonder about the relative freedom I seem to have to decide about things. And abhor when I decide to override a decision coming from a superior if he is mistaken (even theirs).
Yes, my point of view is that the company procedure exists mainly for two reasons: first, it is a tool to help your memory. Second, when it takes away freedom, it absolves the person also out of guilt and then the procedure itself must be at fault (translation: it is nobody's fault since the error is now spread around the company). If a person has done everything according to the procedure, he is legally safe no matter how stupid the consequences. The problem with a procedure is that it also spreads something what we call procedure belief, where the procedure is assumed fault free and inspires sort of belief on the infallibility of the actions listed on a paper, never figuring out why they were placed there on the first place. Which is immediately challenged when something that is NOT listed on the procedure happens - on worst cases leading to people waiting for orders of their deceased superiors in the case of emergency.
Again, the circumstancial evidence in this case would most likely get laughed out of court here, and the person doing the denunciation could really face immediate charges on groundless denunciation that has a good chance of passing. Yes, you really have to have evidence to show that something illegal did happen, instead of flimsy may have happeneds. Moreover, nobody here would assume a crime of one worker would damage the company reputation - common people do understand also that occasionally there is a bad apple there, and it has nothing to do with the company. These things simply happen, but there is no need to start a witch hunt in a company for that. If that happens, the company works decently and tries not to cover it up. Most of the time the alarm is false, but if you end up in a court because of that, it will be visible on your records. This can be a negative thing in background checks later in life.
The amount of time I have spent travelling around the globe, I suspect this kind of legal system is probably seen by others as naive and destructive towards companies (like Nokia now), but on the other hand, the life on the grass roots levels is much more trouble free. Most of us here never see a lawyer during our normal lives.
The strange thing to me to see written here is that the guy who did better than others should be assigned more work. Like it is somehow wrong he is sitting on a coffee table while the rest go to finish up their rounds. No, if he did things more efficiently, either pay him more money and THEN give him more work, or let him have his coffee break. This is the only way to motivate people to improve things. Adding more work would trigger the under perform response. There's no point on trying to improve things if that doesn't lead to any sort of personal benefit. Most companies admittedly do act short-sightedly on this respect, leading to a brain flow to their competitors. The worker level response is simply unfaithfulness towards the company in a way you never tell them your best ideas, or document ALL the little details needed in your work.
