Crook. Go to jail. Do not pass Go.
In before jokes that M$ has way too much money anyway.
A Microsoft staffer has been charged with stealing $450,000 from the company. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Robert Curry, formerly a business development director at the company, has been charged with three counts of wire fraud in the US District Court of Seattle. As part of Microsoft's Strategic Partnership …
He asked a supplier to pay a third party's invoice for him for which they would later be reimbursed? Lending money to pay outstanding debts is the job of a bank not a supplier. They should have twigged straight away.
The excuse that Microsoft takes a long time to get money out is so typical of big businesses run by accountants. Simply not paying invoices on time may temporarily increase the cash flow but the creative accounting required to actually make the company work lays them open to all kinds of scams $450,000 dollars for f**k's sake. Ballmer is the money man, The blame rests with him.
Well, its true that MS delaying payments made this scam possible / believable to the supplier. However, the money earned, even at today's pathetic interest rates, on an extra month or two of payment delay on the billions a company like MS spends each year, is huge. Far more than the potential losses on these types of scams or whatever they spend on internal compliance checks to catch this type of fraud. Its also a handy way of weeding out bad employees, I suppose :)