Greed and unethical behavior frequently go hand-in-hand, and as we should know (and sometimes don’t), it has nothing to do with job title, education or “social status,” Jeff Tran, former sports marketing director, is proof positive of this observation. In the absence of oversite questionable ideas are formed.
Tran had a job that just about anyone in America would envy, even those who hate football. He was the liaison between the National Football League and Microsoft. Every time you see a professional football player or coach reviewing a play on a Microsoft Surface tablet it is a pretty safe guess that Tran had something to do with it.
Sponsorship Deals, Tickets, and Phony Invoices
It was Jeff Tran who was in charge of Microsoft’s promotions with professional football and it was a deal that in 2013 cost Microsoft about $400 million. Why would a software (and hardware) developer pay out so much money? Because the advertising of Microsoft’s products to literally billions of fans throughout the world was worth billions of dollars in product sales.
As part of the NFL’s deal with Microsoft, the company was given Super Bowl game tickets and Super Bowl tailgate area tickets. The person charged with distributing the choice tickets was Jeff Tran, but instead of giving them out to employees, he had another idea.
Tran acquired and then sold 63 game tickets online (through a third-party broker) and even in-person for a profit of nearly $210,000 rather than distributing them for free as he should have done. If that was not enough, in his position he saw an opportunity to generate fake invoices for his promotional efforts. In 2017, he issued fake invoices worth a whopping $1,445,000. He stated on the invoices that it was related to services in support of Super Bowl LI in 2017.
He had the audacity to wire $775,000, to his personal bank account. With the other fake invoice, he created a company called Transamerica, Inc. and that is where his unethical behavior began to unravel.
Who watched Jeff Tran?
At some point, a sharp Microsoft accountant caught up with Jeff Tran. In the sea of invoices that Microsoft must process on a daily basis, Jeff Tran’s $775,000 invoice for services never rendered, was brought to the attention of executives. He was immediately fired, forced to pay restitution and pled guilty to wire fraud and trying to steal nearly $1.5 million. He went to trial, and as part of a plea deal, he may face up to three years in prison. He is “lucky,” he could have faced up to 20 years.
While Tran’s annual salary, benefits, and bonus structures have not been disclosed, as a Microsoft executive responsible for managing all aspects of a $450,000 promotion, I would imagine it was significant. Yet despite his dream job and perks, his lack of ethics was shocking, almost bordering on the incomprehensible.
Who was the person responsible for overseeing Jeff Tran? Apparently, no one. In that space, in the narrow ethical opening of the multi-billion-dollar corporation, Jeff Tran realized he had an opportunity to make a lot of money because no one was watching. What was his need? It is difficult to know. We might like to believe it was financial, that he wanted more money, but it might have been a quest for power, for the thrill of trying to get away with something or something done out of revenge and feeling slighted by higher management. In the end, Jeff Tran could rationalize his actions in any number of ways, up to and including the fact that the company was so vast that no one would care if he stole tickets or submitted paltry invoices that “only” amounted to only $1.5 million.
What he could not rationalize away is that he was a thief who was never ethically trained to know better. In the absence of oversite ethics training is essential.
