My cell phone rings, I answer and hear my partner’s whispered voice, “Do not come to the office.”
Bewildered, I ask him “Why?”
"The Panamanian authorities and lawyers from Microsoft are in our call center. They believe we have been using pirated software and it is a criminal offense."
I am the President of the company, and legally liable.
This was shortly after our second acquisition in Panama. We had never even thought of doing a “software due diligence” to verify that the licenses in our newly acquired call center were legit.
It turns out they were not. All 75 computers.
This began a lengthy negotiation with the Microsoft attorney. They wanted a penalty for every piece of pirated software. Of course, the genius in IT had not only bought the pirated package the call center needed, he had decided to install nearly every software Microsoft makes onto each computer.
Because, if you are going to pirate what you need, why not pirate them all for the same price?
Our computers had Microsoft Paint and Publisher for the heck of it. This was going to be expensive.
We ended up settling for just over $100,000. We also needed to buy legit software licenses immediately, which tacked on roughly another $100,000.
I aged a couple of years in that month and we added “Software Due Diligence” to our pre-closing checklist!