How to Get Fired When Complaining to Your TV Provider [e106]

Nasir and Matt end the week by discussing the accountant who got fired from his job after a dispute he had with Comcast. They then answer the question, "We just brought on our first set of employees. How should we structure their pay to make them happy now and not have it backfire long-term?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to our business legal podcast where we cover business in the news and answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, can send in to ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. We welcome your questions and we will give you the answers and this is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: Now that we’ve got that intro out of the way, let’s start our episode. MATT: The hardest part of every episode is the intro, I think. NASIR: For who? For you or for me? MATT: For me, it’s easy because all I do is say my name but that’s… NASIR: Ah. Then we’ll try it again with you one of these times. I know last time we tried it, you messed up horribly. MATT: I don’t know if I’d say “horribly.” NASIR: I know you wouldn’t say that. MATT: Let’s see. So, we have an interesting story for today, for this Friday episode. There’s actually a lot of detail so I don’t think we’ll be able to go through all the details, all the facts, but it’s pretty interesting kind of what happened. I’ll try to give as brief a summary as possible. So, this guy signed up with Comcast, as most relationships like this begin, some sort of promotional deal. So, he went with that. This was back in the beginning of 2013. Of course, we wouldn’t be talking about this story unless there was a lot of issues involved. So, like I said, this guy signs up with Comcast. There’s all these issues. They think they’ve misspelled his name so that was one thing so he was not getting bills. You know, all these different surcharges that are mystery charges that are coming up, blah blah blah, you know. Eventually, he tried to back out and, you know, a dispute back and forth between the two of them, it goes on and on. One way or the other, they found out, I guess, it looks like they might have searched online to find this out but they found out where this guy worked for and he worked for an accounting firm. And so, like I said, there’s a dispute back and forth between Comcast and this customer. At some point, Comcast actually reaches out at calls the partner of his accounting firm that he works for and kind of just informs the firm on the situation. One thing leads to another and the accounting firm actually ends up firing this guy soon thereafter Comcast calls them to inform them that he’s got some issue. I think they tried to bring ethics into it. So, that’s basically where we’re at. I mean, there’s been a couple of updates. I think Comcast has since kind of apologized – no, no, I take that back – they apologized for their bad billing services and all that, but they didn’t apologize for eventually him actually getting fired. So, from the accounting firm’s perspective, this is a bad decision, right? NASIR: From the accounting firm’s perspective? MATT: Yeah, from the accounting firm’s perspective. NASIR: Well, their reasoning of termination was because somehow they were under the impression – which, of course, the employee denies – that the employee used his firm’s name as basically saying – look, I’m challenging this in behalf of them in the sense that they have their employer’s backing them. Somehow, he used his employer’s name in a way that was improper from the employer’s perspective and it’s unclear exactly how he could have done that and why. He probably mentioned, “Hey, I’m an accountant at this firm and I went through this accounting process to go through all these charges that you mishandled,” and that’s probably what really happened. But it’s unclear the exact reason why the employer did this. I don’t know if you mentioned it – I don’t think you did – that Comcast is actually a client of this accounting firm. MATT: Oh,

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