When the research company I was a partner in found someone at a client company was stealing we told them. That was a mistake.
The job was to go and talk to their regular clients. Obviously we needed to know who and where they were. They gave us a list of local authorities throughout the south of England, all regular clients who had been contacted within the last 6 months according to their area sales guy, who worked from home on around £80,000 a year, 25 years ago. A nice job if you can get it.
Except they weren’t. Time and again we’d phone or call at the offices on the list and they’d say the same thing: We threw that stuff in a skip three years ago. No, nobody has called. No, we don’t use that any more. No, we haven’t placed a new order. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you how we’re getting on using that equipment, because it wasn’t here when I joined the company 18 months ago. I’ve never seen it.
The contact list was a pack of lies. We had a choice. We collude with the lies and make-up interview results. Except we didn’t have any reason to do that. Or we go back to the client and say what had happened. We did that.
Very Rude Indeed
We were immediately called difficult to work with, to our faces. The sales guy was never sanctioned, no action was taken that we ever heard about and it was made clear that if we ever mentioned this again it would officially be considered Very Rude Indeed.
That company was called ICL-Fujitsu. You’ve probably heard of them. They’re the company that helped the Post Office jail over 800 postmasters, pretending there was nothing wrong with their terminally-flawed Horizon system when they knew perfectly well that it could not be trusted to even tally a daily list of transactions. They lied throughout the investigation into Horizon and they lied throughout the prosecution of each of the 800+ postmasters who went to prison for using their rubbish computer system.
But as Johnson, Farage, Trump, Paula Vennels and Baroness Mone know full well, lying is good for you. There’s no danger, as Elvis Costello told us. It’s a professional career.
