Hey guys, working back to our slash pro revenge in this video.

My boss told me I was just a bookkeeper and stole four thousand dollars from my final paycheck.

She thought she had won, but what she didn't realize is that for six years I was not just doing the payroll.

I was building a mountain of evidence against her illegal empire.

And the first one is titled smirk Karen, Owner refuses to pay dumb employee.

So I used to work as a bookkeeper slash office manager for a landscaping company.

Let's call the owner Karen, because that's basically what she was.

I worked there for six years, handling everything from payroll to taxes to vendor payments.

Basically, if money was involved, it went through me.

Now, Karen was one of those self made business owner types who thought she was God's gift to entrepreneurship.

She started the company with her husband about fifteen years ago, and to be fair, they built it up from nothing to a pretty successful operation.

They had several full time crews doing residential and commercial work, plus a separate for snow removal in winter.

The problem was Karen's success went straight to her head.

She had this attitude that office workers were somehow beneath the real workers who did the actual landscaping.

I cannot tell you how many times I heard her say stuff like, must be nice to sit in the ac all day, or anyone can enter numbers into a computer.

She would make these comments in front of customers, other employees, vendors, didn't matter who was around.

It was embarrassing.

The thing is I was not just entering numbers.

I was literally running the financial side of her entire business, processing payroll for sixty employees every week, managing accounts, payable and receivable, handling tax filings, dealing with insurance claims, and negotiating with suppliers.

The works.

But in Karen's mind, I was just some secretary who pushed papers around.

For six years, I kept my mouth shut because the pay was decent and the work was steady.

Plus I actually liked most of the crew guys.

They were good people who worked hard, and I made sure they got paid on time and their better off itits were handled properly.

Karen might not have respected what I did, but they did.

Over those six years.

I also saw a lot of things that since said right with me.

See Karen, like to portray herself as this upstanding business owner, but behind closed doors she was cutting corners left and right, and since everything financial went through me, I had a front row seat to all of it.

First off, she was paying a bunch of guys under the table, not just occasional help.

We are talking regular crew members who had been working there for years.

She would hand them cash at the end of the week and tell me to record it as supply or equipment rental or whatever.

When I mentioned that this was not exactly legal, she would wave me off and say, that's how construction works, honey, you would not understand.

Then there was the whole one oh ninety nine contractor thing.

Karen classified about half her full time employees as independent contractors instead of employees.

These guys were showing up every day, using company equipment, following company schedules, and taking direction from supervisors.

Basically everything that screams employee according to the irs.

However, Karen didn't want to pay the employer portion of Social Security and Medicare taxes, so boom contractors.

And of course she was also skimming cash payments.

Like crazy, customers would pay cash for smaller jobs than Karen would just pocket it.

She would tell me this doesn't need an invoice, or just market as a discount on their account.

I would watch her stuff hundreds of dollars in cash into her purse and then act like nothing happened.

But the real kicker was how she inflated business expenses.

Her kids' cars were listed as work vehicles.

Family vacations became business travel to scout new markets.

Her daughter's college tuition was somehow empry training.

She even tried to write off their pool installation as a client entertainment facility.

The woman really had zero shame.

I kept particulars records of all of this stuff, not because there was planning anything.

I just believe in covering your ass.

Screenshots, exported reports, copies of invoices before Karen adjusted them.

I had it all stored on a personal drive at home.

Call it intuition or paranoia, but something told me that I would need evidence someday.

Well that someday came when I decided to leave.

I'd been there six years, and frankly, I was tired of watching Karen treat people like garbage while acting like she was some kind of business genius.

I found a position with a local accounting firm that paid significantly better and came with actual respect from management.

I gave Karen two weeks notice.

On a Wednesday morning, professional polite offered to help train whoever would be taking over my responsibilities, and her reaction was not great.

Well that's just perfect, she said, not even looking up from her phone, right in the middle of busy season.

Typical.

I explained that I'd stay the full two weeks and would put together a detailed hand over notes for everything, but she just rolled her eyes.

Whatever, just make sure all the files are organized before you leave, and don't think you getting paid for sitting around those last few days if there's nothing to do.

That should have been my first red flag, but I she was just being her usual charming self.

The real fun started the next week.

I've been working on transitioning everything to their new bookkeeper, Karen's nephew, who had exactly zero accounting experience but was apparently good with computers.

As I was training this kid on payroll processing, Karen comes storming into the office.

We need to talk about your PTO payout, she announced.

I had three weeks of a crude vacation time, which worked out to about four thousand dollars.

It was clearly listed on every PASTOP I'd ever received, and the employee handbook specifically stated that unused PTO would be paid out upon termination.

Uh what about it, I asked, Well, I've been thinking about it, and I don't think we should pay it out.

You're abandoning us during our busiest time of the year, and frankly, you haven't been doing the job we hired you for anyway.

I blinked at her, What do you mean, I haven't been doing my job while all this hand over training you're doing just proofs you are not documenting processes properly.

If you were really doing your job right, anyone should be able to step in and figure it out.

The fact that my nephew needs training shows you were being lazy and sloppy.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing here, Karen.

I've been documenting everything for years.

I created the entire filing system you're using.

The training is to make sure nothing gets misduring the transition.

She waved her hand dismissively.

Look, I've decided we are not paying out the PDO, and your final paycheck is going to be held until you complete their proper transition training program.

I'm talking comprehensive documentation of every single process and procedure that's not legal, Karen.

The employee handbook clearly states, oh please, She interrupted, What are you going to do sue me?

You're a bookkeeper, You anent her numbers into quick books and answer phones.

Don't pretend you're some kind of professional who knows about employment law.

That was it.

That was the moment Karen sealed her fate.

See I might just be a bookkeeper, but I've been handling her books for six years.

I knew exactly how much tex fraud she had been committing, and I had evidence, but I played it cool.

Well, okay, Karen, I guess I will have to file a wage claim.

Then she left me go ahead.

Good luck with that.

Do you have any idea how much I pay my lawyer?

You think the state is going to care about some disgruntled employee who cannot even do her job properly.

I finished out my two weeks with a smile on my face.

Karen made a big show of inspecting my work and finding problems with everything.

She nitpicked every file, every process, every document.

Her nephew was taking notes like he was preparing for the bar exam.

On my last day, she handed me my final paycheck minus the PTO payout.

Of course, remember, she said, with a smug smile, none disclosure agreement is still in effect.

I better not hear about you bad mouthing this company around town.

Of course, not Karen.

I'm nothing if not professional.

The first thing I did was file a wage claim with the State Labor Board.

Karen was right about one thing.

I was not a lawyer, but I knew how to read an employee handbook and I knew what documentation I needed.

The claim was for the three weeks of unpaid PTO plus penalties for withholding wages.

It was an open and shot case, and the state ruled in my favor and ordered Karen to pay me the full mount plus additional penalties for illegal wait withholding.

She had to cut me a check for almost six thousand dollars.

But that is when things got really interesting.

See Karen did not take losing gracefully.

She started calling me a thief around town, telling anyone who would listen that I had stolen money from the company and that the state had been fooled by fake documentation.

She called my new employer and tried to get me fired, claiming I was under investigation for embezzlement.

That's when I decided to stop playing nice.

I'd kept all those financial records for six years, thinking I might need them to cover myself someday.

I never thought I would be using them to destroy someone's entire life.

But Karen had made it personal.

She wanted to call me a thief.

She wanted to try to ruin my reputation in my career.

Fine, let's see how she liked having her dirty laundry aired.

I spent a weekend going through everything I had, bank statements, cash receipts, payroll records, tax filings, venda in voices, the whole nine yards.

I organized it all chronologically and started documenting the patterns.

What I found was worse than i'd even remembered.

Karen had been systematically committing tax fraud for years.

I'm talking about over a million dollars and unreported income across the six years I worked there.

The cash skimming alone accounted for probably two hundred thousand dollars at in the misclassified employees, the inflated business expenses, and the under the table payments.

And we were looking at serious federal tax evasion.

However, I wanted to be smart about this.

I was not going to just dump everything on the IRS and hope for the best.

I contacted a tax attorney who specialized in whistleblower cases and laid everything out for him.

That guy was practically drooling by the time I finished explaining the situation.

We spent the next month preparing the whistleblower complaint.

The attorney helped me organize the evidence and write up a comprehensive report detailing every violation we could prove.

We are talking about a filing that was over one hundred pages long with supporting documentation.

But I didn't stop there.

Karen had opened this door when she decided to destroy my reputation, so I was gonna walk through it with both guns blazing.

I also filed complaints with the state for worker misclassification and with the Department of Labor for systematic wage theft.

See all those guys Karen was paying under the table they were not getting over time pay, and all those employees she classified as contractors.

The state was very interested in the employer taxes she hadn't been paying, and all those cash payments she had pocketed.

The IRS gets really cranky when you don't report income to them.

The IRS whistleblower program is a beautiful thing.

If they collect money based on your tip, you get between fifteen and thirty percent of whatever they recover.

And federal tax forra penalties are no joke.

We're talking about potential criminal charges, not just back taxes.

I filed everything and then set back to wait.

The attorney wanted me it could take a while.

The IRS doesn't move fast on anything, but he was confident that we had a strong case.

In the meantime, Karen's business was starting to have problems.

The State Labor investigation had triggered an audit of her worker classifications when she was being forced to reclassify a bunch of employees that meant paying back employment taxes plus penalties.

The Department of Labor was also sniffing around looking into wage theft allegations.

But Karen be and Karen she was still acting like nothing was wrong.

Apparently, she was telling people the investigations were just bureaucratic harassment and that she would fight them all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.

That confidence lasted until the IRS showed up.

I wasn't there when it happened, obviously, but I heard about it from one of the crew guys I stayed in touch with.

They walked out with boxes and boxes of documents, plus her computer hard drives.

Karen tried to play it off at first.

She told employees it was just a routine audit and that everything would be cleared up quickly.

But when the IRS freezes your business accounts pending investigation, it is very hard to pretend that everything is normal.

The local newspaper picked up the story about a month later.

They did not name Karen specifically, but everyone in town knew who they were talking about.

I mean, the landscaping indus here is not that big.

That is when the dominoes really started falling.

Though.

Customers started canceling contracts left and right.

Nobody wants to do business with someone who's under a federal investigation.

Suppliers started demanding payment upfront instead of extending credit.

Several key employees quit because they were worried about the company's stability.

But the real killer was when the state finished their investigation into worker misclassification.

They determined that Karen owed way over three hundred thousand dollars in back employment taxes plus penalties and interest.

The bill came due immediately.

Karen tried to fight it, of course, She even hired lawyers and filed appeals and made a lot of noise about how the state was trying to destroy small businesses.

But when you've been misclassifying employees for years and there's a paper trail proving it, there's not much wiggle room.

The final nail in the coffin came when the RS finished their audit.

They determined that Karen had under reported her income by approximately one point two million dollars over six years.

The penalties and interest brought the total amount ode to over two million dollars.

Karen tried everything to avoid paying.

She claimed the business was in financial distress and couldn't afford the full amount.

She offered settlement proposals that were basically insulting.

She even tried to claim that the whole thing was just a result of poor bookkeeping rather than intentional fraud.

That last one really got to me.

Here she was trying to blame me for her own criminal behavior.

She was literally arguing that her dumb bookkeeper had been so incompetent that she accidentally committed text fraud for six years.

Well sadly, the IRS was not buying it.

They had too much evidence showing intentional concealment of income, the cash skimming, the fake business expenses, the deliberate misclassification of employees.

It all pointed to systematic fraud rather than accidental mistakes.

When it became clear that Karen couldn't pay the full amount ode, the government started seizing assets of hers.

First they put leans on the business equipment, then they went after her personal assets.

The business trucks, the expenses, machinery, even her personal vehicles got seized.

Karen had to sell the company to try to cover the debt, but by then the business was essentially worthless.

Customer contracts had been canceled, key employees had left, and the reputation was destroyed.

She ended up selling the equipment and client list for maybe thirty cents on the dollar, but even that was not enough to cover what she owed.

The government ended up seizing her house, her vacation property, pretty much everything she had built over fifteen years of running the business.

And the best part that whistleblower reward was quite juicy.

The landscaping company is completely gone now, then name the reputation.

Everything Karen and her husband built up over fifteen years all destroyed because she was too cheap and too arrogant to pay her bookkeepers final wages.

The crew I liked had to find new jobs, which sucks, but most of them landed on their feet with other companies pretty quickly.

Word gets around in that industry about who the good workers are.

I'm doing great at my new job.

By the way, turns out when you work for pea who actually respect your professional expertise, life is a lot more enjoyable.

My boss actually asks for my input on financial decisions and treats me like the professional I am imagine that.

The moral of the story, well, don't screw over the person who handles your books.

We see everything, we remember everything, and we know exactly how to make your life very difficult if you push us too far.

Karen learned that lesson the hard way.

It would have been so much cheaper to just pay me that four thousand dollars, but I'm glad she didn't, because watching everything she built crumbled to dust was honestly the most satisfying thing I've ever experienced.

Sometimes people need to learn that actions do have consequences, and the next one is a fantastic malicious compliance story that is titled I was forced to eat at a fancy restaurant for a month many years ago.

I got put on a work assignment four months that required me to travel to New York City and stay every Monday till Friday.

So I was assisting a company manager with a project, and my hotel was near his regular office in the Theater District.

If you're not familiar, the Theater District is heavily built for tourist.

Restaurants are generally kind of fancy and expensive, and there were really not any quick and cheap options for dining in that area.

The company had a generous meal policy of up to thirty to forty per meal for travel expenses.

I did use that for a bit, but the food got to feeling too indulgent and kind of ridiculous given it was an extended assignment.

Also, I was working really long hours and didn't want to go sit in restaurants.

I just wanted to go watch TV and sleep in my room.

So after the first week or so, I instead went to a grocery store on Monday night.

I bought some basics for cereal signwiches, snacks, and some frozen meals.

I cout microwave for lunch in the office.

It cost about sixty dollars.

I then took a few cans of soda from my hotel fridge to make room for my weekly food purchase and returned them before checking out at the end of the week.

And that was it for food costs, with an occasional meal out here or there.

I did the same the next four weeks, submitted my expense report at the end of the month.

You know where this is going.

A lady accounting called me and refused to reimburse my expenses because apparently sixty dollars is more than forty dollars that makes allowance for one meal purchase.

I explained that had covered five days of food, but was told it didn't matter.

I then spent the next month trying all the food in the neighborhood.

There were really not any cheap options.

I went out to eat a few mornings, lunch whenever I found time, and dinner absolutely every day.

I could have bought a few installments of groceries, but the once per week's shopping convenience was part of why I had wanted them.

It had also seemed wasteful for me to go out for an expensive meal every night for long term travel, but now I'd been told that was preferred by accounting to my grocery bills.

The next month, I got a call from my NYC manager asking how I had run through more budget every week of the month than the entire month before combined.

I explained the grocery situation, He thanked me and then hung up.

About ten minutes later, that same lady from accounting called me to tell me that they would pay my still not reimbursed grocery bill and any going forward as long as the daily amount average for the week was under the aggregate meal allowance.

I happily returned to a more reasonable diet.

And the next one is another malicious compliance story, which is titled walk Slowly so we can watch Baby.

Years ago, I worked as a cocktail bartender and waiter.

A group of suits came in and sat down and I went to take their order.

I got a bad vibe of them from the get go, and after I finished the order and went to leave, this thirty something sleazy guy said loud enough for everyone to hear walk away slowly, baby, so we can watch.

I smiled at him and started to do an over dramatic slow motion back way, keeping eye contact with him and smiling the whole time.

I told the other waiters about it, and everyone started doing these slow motion walks whenever they walked past their table.

The best one was a busboy who deliberately dropped something next to their table and then did a very slow and sexy pickup like the band and snap from Legally Blonde.

They left pretty quickly, and you guys, thank you for watching.

I will see you again tomorrow