I work for a small company, in the United States. Part of my duties is building out quotes for products and services our company sells. I'm trying to avoid being overly specific, but basically I have been asked to quote out a product we often sell, but to also include in the quote a feature which out company cannot actually provide. The customer has several of the item I am supposed to quote already and believes that they have the additional feature on all of the existing devices, so expects to see it on this quote for their new site.
I have brought up with my boss in the past that we have not implemented the additional feature and to the best of my knowledge we can't. He assured me he was looking at addressing that. Today, after receiving the request for this new quote, I asked my boss about it, he said he still hasn't come up with a plan to address the issue, but wants me to move forward with pricing it out anyway.
It would be a big hit to our company if the customer left us, but I struggle to see how what my company is doing here isn't fraud. I'm not really comfortable with doing this, but my relationship with management is already strained and I wasn't really looking to create any more waves at the moment.
Are there good resources I could look to to determine if this would constitute fraud from a legal perspective? Has anyone here ever been in a similar situation?
I'm looking for another job, but don't have anything lined up yet, so nervous about doing (or not doing) something that would get me fired, but Im not comfortable with what appears to me to be dishonest at best and fraudulent at worst.
Edit: wanted to add that to the best of my knowledge, we aren't selling that additional feature to anyone else at the moment. I think my boss is just afraid of this customer in particular finding out since they've already been sold the feature and they're a larger customer.
Edit 2: thanks everyone for the advice. It is much appreciated. I've got a lot of thinking to do tonight.
I have never worked in IT and not had at least one project I worked on which I didn't think was immoral. Even at a small web dev agency I was working on an app for keeping track of zero hours contract workers during their shifts in a major UK supermarket. I got invited into a meeting 2 weeks before it got released and told not to buy any tescos stock.
2 weeks later on release they fired several thousand of their full time employees and referred them on to this 3rd party to get their old jobs back with new - worse - contracts like zero guaranteed working hours.
Then there was the startup that was in adtech and spied on people online. We were on the adblock easylist of trackers to block.
After that there was the gambling company... idk it just seems like every job has a morally grey component to it.
Edit: had an episode of John Oliver Last Week Tonight about my current company on air last week.
Edit 2: One of my friends was working for VW in Berlin when the emissions test scandal came out. Ultimately she quit being a SWE and became a nurse. I guess everyone has their own tolerance levels for the shady shit they are comfortable doing at work.
Another friend used to work for a porn site but wouldn't ever touch gambling. He's still a SWE though.
So, given your work history, where do you stand on the Clerks deathstar contractor debate?
Uh I guess my movie enthusiast opinion is that Clerks is a very funny movie that has some surprisingly good social commentary burried under the irreverence.
If we're talking about the actual morality of normal people working at "evil" companies, then I guess it wouldn't be an injustice if there was some kind of cosmic punishment for it. The reality is that capitalism is cut throat and typically more "evil" companies like the arms, gambling or tobacco industry offer you better benefits or financial renumeration than ones that don't have that stigma.
At the same time I'd argue that there are very few truly "good" jobs. A large component of the charity sector is essentially sales; even if you are working at a company building some inoffensive productivity app or B2B software you can end up potentially automating work that used to be done by a human office admin.
At the end of the day you need to work out what your individual tolerance level is for the excesses of capitalism. If society really frowns upon an industry then people vote and the laws change so ultimately those are the parameters you are working within.