CFO fires the “useless” IT guy in front of the whole company for a system crash… But he wasn’t IT—he owned 51% of the company and had six months of evidence proving she’d been embezzling millions
The all-hands meeting was supposed to last twenty minutes. It lasted six.
“Can someone PLEASE explain why our entire system crashed this morning?” Victoria Chen’s voice cut through the conference room like a blade. She stood at the front, arms crossed, her Hermès blazer sharp enough to draw blood.
Fifty employees sat in uncomfortable silence. I stayed in the back corner, laptop bag on my knees.
“You.” Victoria pointed directly at me. “IT guy. The one who’s been here what, six months? Stand up.”
I stood slowly.
“What’s your name again?”
“David Morrison.”
“David.” She said it like the word tasted bad. “Your system crashed our payment processing for three hours this morning. Do you understand how much money that cost us?”
“It wasn’t my—”
“I don’t want excuses.” She stepped closer, heels clicking on the hardwood. “I want answers. Did you or did you not touch the server configuration yesterday?”
“I ran a routine backup. Standard protocol.”
Victoria laughed. Actually laughed. “Standard protocol. This is a Series B company, not your college dorm room.”
A few nervous chuckles rippled through the crowd.
“The crash happened because someone disabled the redundancy failsafe,” I said quietly. “That wasn’t me.”
“Oh, so now you’re blaming someone else?” Victoria turned to address the room. “This is what happens when you hire bottom-tier contractors to save money. They break things, then point fingers.”
My jaw tightened. I’d heard worse in the past six months.
“You’re fired,” Victoria said. “Effective immediately. Linda will process your final payment. Clean out your desk and leave your badge at reception.”
The room went dead silent.
“Actually,” I said, “I quit.”
Victoria blinked. “Excuse me?”
“I quit. Because I’m firing you.”
Someone near the front gasped.
Victoria’s smile was pure venom. “Are you having some kind of breakdown? Security—”
“Before you call security, you might want to check your calendar.” I pulled out my phone. “You have a board meeting scheduled in fifteen minutes. Conference Room B.”
Her face went pale. “How do you—”
“I scheduled it. Three weeks ago. Unanimous vote required for executive termination.” I glanced at my watch. “You have fourteen minutes.”
“This is insane.” But her voice had lost its edge. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
“David Morrison.” I met her eyes. “Alexander Morrison’s son.”
The room erupted. Whispers, gasps, someone’s chair scraping back.
Victoria’s face cycled through emotions—confusion, disbelief, rage. “Alex didn’t have a son. He told me—”
“He had a son who was in grad school when he died. A son who inherited fifty-one percent of this company.” I let that sink in. “Thirteen minutes.”
“You’re lying.” But she was already pulling out her phone, fingers shaking as she scrolled. “This is some kind of con. Alex left everything to me. I was his partner, his—”
“You were his CFO. Not his beneficiary.” I opened my laptop, turned it toward the room. “My father died of a heart attack eighteen months ago. Sudden. Unexpected. You told everyone he wanted you to run the company.”
“He did!”
“Then explain why the will filed with his attorney names me as primary heir. Explain why you never mentioned me to the board. Explain why you filed paperwork claiming he had no living relatives.”
Victoria’s knuckles were white on her phone. “I don’t have to explain anything to some IT contractor who—”
“I wasn’t just IT.” I pulled up a folder on my screen. “I was documenting. Every day for six months.”
Her eyes went wide.
“Screen recordings,” I said. “Keystroke logs. Every transfer you made to those offshore accounts. Every falsified expense report. Every email to your contact in the Cayman Islands.”
“That’s illegal surveillance—”
“That’s lawful monitoring of company resources by the majority shareholder. My lawyer assures me it’s completely admissible.” I glanced at my watch again. “Eleven minutes. You should probably head to Conference Room B.”
“This is a coup.” Victoria looked around the room desperately. “He’s trying to steal the company that Alex built. You all know me. You know what I’ve done here—”
“We know you’ve been bleeding us dry,” said Sarah Chen from product. She stood up, phone in hand. “I got an email this morning. From David’s lawyer. With documentation.”
Three more people stood. Then five. Then ten.
“You’ve been rejecting our raises for a year,” said Marcus from engineering. “Said we couldn’t afford it. But you bought a house in Napa. And a condo in Miami.”
“I have private investments—”
“With company money.” I advanced the slides on my laptop. The first image appeared on the conference room screen—a wire transfer receipt. “Forty thousand dollars from our operating account to your personal LLC. Tagged as ‘consulting fees.’”
Victoria lunged for the laptop. I stepped back smoothly.
“Here’s another one.” Click. “Sixty-five thousand. Vendor payment for marketing services that were never rendered.” Click. “Ninety thousand. Equipment purchase from a company that doesn’t exist.”
“Stop—”
Click. Click. Click. The images kept coming.
“In six months,” I said, “you transferred two-point-three million dollars out of this company. You almost destroyed what my father built.”
Victoria’s face was red, then white, then gray. “You can’t prove those weren’t legitimate—”
“I can. The FBI can too.” I nodded toward the glass doors.
Two agents in dark suits stood in the hallway. They’d been there the whole time.
Victoria saw them. Her knees actually buckled. She grabbed the edge of the conference table.
“The board meeting starts in nine minutes,” I said quietly. “But I don’t think you’ll make it.”
The lead FBI agent pushed open the door. “Victoria Chen?”
“This is—this is a mistake—”
“Ma’am, we have a warrant for your arrest on charges of wire fraud, embezzlement, and falsification of corporate documents.” He held up the paperwork. “You have the right to remain silent.”
Victoria looked at me, and for the first time, I saw actual fear.
“My father trusted you,” I said. “He called you brilliant. He thought you’d take care of his company after he was gone.”
“I did take care of it—”
“You gutted it. You fired good people to hide the budget holes. You delayed product launches because you’d stolen the development funds. You told everyone my father wanted you in charge because you needed them to believe it.”
The agent stepped forward with handcuffs.
“Wait.” Victoria’s voice cracked. “David. Please. We can work this out. I can pay it back. I can—”
“You told the whole company I was useless,” I said. “You humiliated me in front of fifty people. Called me bottom-tier.”
“I didn’t know—”
“That’s not an apology. That’s regret about getting caught.”
The handcuffs clicked shut.
“Victoria Chen, you’re under arrest.” The agent began reading her rights as he guided her toward the door.
She twisted back to look at me. “You set this up. You planned this whole thing.”
“I documented evidence of a crime. You committed the crime.”
“Alex would never—”
“My father would have turned you in himself.” I closed my laptop. “He built this company to help people. You turned it into your personal ATM.”
The agents led her out. Through the glass walls, I watched them walk her past the rows of desks, past the reception area with its inspirational quotes my father had chosen, past the framed photo of the original team.
The conference room stayed silent for a long moment.
Then Sarah spoke up. “What happens now? To the company?”
I turned to face them. Fifty pairs of eyes. Scared. Uncertain. Hopeful.
“First, we fire the entire executive team who helped her or looked the other way.” I pulled up a list. “Three VPs. Two directors. All complicit or negligent. They’re gone by end of day.”
A few people shifted uncomfortably.
“Second, we promote from within. Sarah, you’re the new head of product. Marcus, you’re CTO. Linda, you’ve been holding HR and finance together with duct tape—you’re COO.”
Sarah’s hand went to her mouth. Marcus just stared.
“Third, we restructure. I’m not interested in running a traditional hierarchy. My father wanted this company to be different. So we’re going to be.” I pulled up the next slide. “Employee ownership structure. Everyone in this room gets equity. Real equity. Voting shares.”
The silence broke. People started talking, gasping, a few even crying.
“You’re serious?” Linda asked. “Actual ownership?”
“My father built this company with twenty people who believed in him. You’re the people who stayed when she was gutting the budget. You’re the ones who deserve to own it.”
“But you own fifty-one percent,” someone called out.
“I’m transferring thirty percent to an employee pool. I keep twenty-one percent and a board seat. You elect the rest of the board. You vote on major decisions.” I smiled. “That’s what my father would have wanted.”
Marcus stood up. Then Sarah. Then the whole room. Someone started clapping. Then everyone.
I held up my hand. “One more thing. The money she stole? The FBI’s going to seize her assets. The house. The condo. The offshore accounts. It won’t be all of it, but we’ll get about sixty percent back.”
“What do we do with it?” Linda asked.
“Raises. Retroactive to when she started cutting pay. Plus bonuses. Plus the expansion into AI tools we shelved last year.” I looked around the room. “We’re going to build what we should have built eighteen months ago.”
Sarah wiped her eyes. “Why’d you wait six months? If you knew she was stealing—”
“I needed proof. Incontrovertible, FBI-grade proof. And I needed to understand who in this company was part of it versus who was just scared.” I picked up my laptop bag. “Also, I needed to make sure she fired me in front of everyone.”
“Why?” Marcus asked.
“Because I wanted you all to see who she really was. I wanted witnesses when the truth came out.” I headed for the door. “Board meeting is in seven minutes. Anyone who wants to attend is welcome.”
Conference Room B was smaller. More intimate. The board members were already seated—two investors, one independent director, and my father’s old attorney.
I took my seat at the head of the table. The chair my father used to sit in.
“Let’s begin,” I said. “First order of business: formal termination of Victoria Chen as CFO and CEO, effective immediately upon her arrest, which occurred approximately four minutes ago.”
The investors exchanged glances.
“All in favor?”
Five hands went up. Unanimous.
“Second order of business: company restructure to employee ownership model. I’m distributing materials now.”
I spent the next hour walking them through it. The equity distribution. The voting structure. The financial projections showing how this would actually make the company more profitable, not less.
“Your father would love this,” the attorney said quietly. “He always said the best companies were the ones where everyone had skin in the game.”
“That’s why I’m doing it.”
By five PM, the paperwork was filed. By six PM, the news had spread through the entire office. By seven PM, I was sitting in my father’s old office—my office now—looking at the photo on the desk.
My father and me. Hiking in Yosemite. Three months before he died.
My phone buzzed. A message from Sarah: “We’re ordering pizza for everyone. Celebration. You coming down?”
I looked at the photo one more time.
“I think we did okay, Dad,” I said to the empty room.
Then I headed downstairs to join my company.
Our company.
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