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.
One of our former bosses asked me to sign something clearly illegal. I told him NO. I am still here, the boss is a former boss.
I wish mine was that simple. I was asked to install our RMM (backdoor remote access tool) on a partners home personal computer. I said I didn’t feel comfortable doing this without her knowledge and without good reason. Wrote up a long email with explanation after I was told to do it anyway. The reply I got from the email was “you don’t get to make that decision, you’re going to get a bad review this year, do what you’re told.”
Luckily it took me about 2 weeks to find another job, and fully disclosed why I was leaving. Emailed everything to HR and left without warning, even told the partner their plan.
Left them scathing reviews on all platforms, HR even reached out about my reviews. Said “you didn’t care then, what’s changed”
A side quest of my life is to keep their reviews around 2.5 forever. I’ve got a dozen fake accounts to help already. Fuck them.