Starting on 2004 Boeing has been having problems relating to their computer system’s security. Its seems that they have not being compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley act of 2002. The Sarbanes-Oxley act is there to protect shareholders and the company from any sort of financial fraud but Boeings system have been open to potential manipulation, theft and fraud for a couple of years. This means that an employee to potentially steal from the company and be able to hide it from any sort of financial tracking or that the company itself boost it profit when it reality they are much smaller to keep shareholders happy. The act also has had a lot of complaints from a number of companies for its lack of specific guidelines for the implementation of the system security since then a company has to play a guessing game to determine if in fact they are complaint or not.
This has cost Boeing hundreds of millions of dollars to attempt to solve. The Boeing workers started to grow more tired with the passing years as they could not seem to fix the issue. It was extremely hard for the to do their work since every single code changed had to be properly documented and approved before it could be integrated into the system. There were also problems between the Boeing employees, external consultants and the audit teams since they all had different ideas about how to solve the issue which would waste a lot of time by not being able to agree to anything. It reached a point were some Boeing employees went to the press to discuss the issues that were currently occurring at the company.
The company decided to fire these employees as the had leak company internal documents. I think that the employees were trying to do a good thing to inform the world and the shareholders about the current problems in the company but definitely did it in the wrong way. Boeing was treating their computer security employees badly but were in the right to fire the ones that leaked the documents. They estimated a potential cost anywhere from 5 billion to 15 billion if the leaked documents got into the wrong hands. The mistake that I think the whistleblower did was the fact that they allegedly stole about 32,000 company files and apparently having a password-cracking tools in their computers. The number of files and the tool found makes me think that they were trying to hurt the company more than trying to help it.
The employees who leaked the documents should not be protected under the whistleblower protection laws since it seem they had more of a intent to hurt the company than to “help” it. If it had only been a document or two giving general descriptions about the internal problems then maybe they could had been protected but the act of stealing thousands was to much. Their firing was rightful since what would stop them from in the future leaking even more documents if the problems persisted and caused the company some real harm.
Norman Morales 